EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURY 

VIGNETTES 

BY / 

AUSTIN TJOBSON 



" Faute d'archanges, il faut aimer des 
creatures imparfaites." 




NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD J~j QC 
AND COMPANY .... 1892 



It 



u' 



^v 



Copyright, 1892, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 



All rights reserved. 



2Entbersttg press: 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 




V 






TO 

HAMILTON W. MABIE, 

ARE CORDIALLY INSCRIBED. 



L? 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



"CIFTEEN of the twenty papers comprised 
in this volume appeared in the New York 
1 Christian Union,' at the suggestion of whose 
Editor the series was begun. Only one of 
these fifteen — 'The Citizen of the World 1 — 
has been reprinted in England. Of the five 
papers remaining, ' Old Vauxhall Gardens ' was 
published in • Scribner's Magazine;' and the 
other four in the ' Saturday Review,' ' Long- 
man's Magazine,' the ' National Review,' and 
the * Library' respectively. Where permission 
to reprint was required, it has been obtained ; 
and is hereby gratefully acknowledged. 

With the exception of the last two, which 
are more general in character than the rest, 
the papers are chronologically arranged. They 
do not, by any means, exhaust the original list 
of subjects drawn up by their writer for the 



vi Prefatory Note. 

kind of episodical treatment at which they 
aim ; and should these first essays find a pub- 
lic, it is not impossible ('if the good Fates 
please ') that they may be followed by a fur- 
ther collection. 



CONTENTS. 



♦ 

PAGE 

-Steele's Letters 9 

Prior's * Kitty' 19 

Spence's 'Anecdotes' 31 

-"♦Captain Coram's Charity 44 

—'The Female Quixote' 55 

—Fielding's 'Voyage to Lisbon' 68 

Hanway's Travels 79 

""A Garret in Gough Square 93 

-Hogarth's Sigismunda 104 

'The Citizen of the World' ...... 115 

An Old London Bookseller 125 

Gray's Library . 136 

The New Chesterfield . 147 

A Day at Strawberry Hill . 158 

Goldsmith's Library 167- 

In Cowper's Arbour 176 

The Quaker of Art 189 

Bewick's Tailpieces 200 

A German in England . .211 

Old Vauxhall Gardens 230 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VIGNETTES. 



STEELE'S LETTERS. 

f^N the 19th of May, 1708, Her Majesty 
^^ Queen Anne being then upon the throne of 
Great Britain and Ireland, a coach with two 
horses, gaudy rather than neat in its appoint- 
ments, drew up at the door of my Lord Sunder- 
land's Office in Whitehall. It contained a lady 
about thirty, of considerable personal attrac- 
tions, and dressed richly in cinnamon satin. She 
was a brunette, with a rather high forehead, the 
height of which was ingeniously broken by two 
short locks upon the temples. Moreover, she 
had distinctly fine eyes, and a mouth which, in 
its normal state, must have been arch and pretty, 
but was now drawn down at the corners under 
the influence of some temporary irritation. As 
the coach stopped, a provincial-looking servant 
promptly alighted, pulled out from the box-seat 
a large case of the kind used for preserving the 



io Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

voluminous periwigs of the period, and subse- 
quently extracted from the same receptacle a 
pair of shining new shoes with square toes and 
silver buckles. These, with the case, he car- 
ried carefully into the house, returning shortly 
afterwards. Then ensued what, upon the stage, 
would be called 'an interval,' during which time 
the high forehead of the lady began to cloud 
visibly with impatience, and the corners of her 
mouth to grow more ominous. At length, about 
twenty minutes later, came a sound of laughter 
and noisy voices ; and by-and-by bustled out of 
the Cockpit portal a square-shouldered, square- 
faced man in a rich dress, which, like the coach, 
was a little showy. He wore a huge black full- 
bottomed periwig. Speaking with a marked 
Irish accent, he made profuse apologies to the 
occupant of the carriage — apologies which, as 
might be expected, were not well received. An 
expression of vexation came over his good-tem- 
pered face as he took his seat at the lady's side, 
and he lapsed for a few minutes into a moody 
silence. But before they had gone many yards, 
his dark, deep-set eyes began to twinkle once 
more as he looked about him. When they 
passed the Tilt- Yard, a detachment of the 
Second Troop of Life Guards, magnificent in 
their laced red coats, jack boots, and white 



Steele's Letters. n 

feathers, came pacing out on their black horses. 
They took their way towards Charing Cross, 
and for a short distance followed the same 
route as the chariot. The lady was loftily indif- 
ferent to their presence ; and she was, besides, 
on the farther side of the vehicle. But her 
companion manifestly recognized some old ac- 
quaintances among them, and was highly grati- 
fied at being recognized in his turn, although at 
the same time it was evident he was also a little 
apprehensive lest the ' Gentlemen of the Guard,' 
as they were called, should be needlessly de- 
monstrative in their acknowledgment of his ex- 
istence. After this, nothing more of moment 
occurred. Slowly mounting St. James's Street, 
the coach turned down Piccadilly, and, passing 
between the groups of lounging lackeys at the 
gate, entered Hyde Park. Here, by the time 
it had once made the circuit of the Ring, the 
lady's equanimity was completely restored, and 
the gentleman was radiant. He was, in truth, 
to use his own words, ' no undelightful Com- 
panion.' He possessed an infinite fund of wit 
and humour ; and his manner to women had a 
sincerity of deference which was not the pre- 
vailing characteristic of his age. 

There is but slender invention in this little 
picture. The gentleman was Captain Steele, 



12 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

late of the Life Guards, the Coldstreams, and 
Lucas's regiment of foot, now Gazetteer and 
Gentleman Waiter to Queen Anne's consort, 
Prince George of Denmark, and not yet ' Mr. 
Isaac Bickerstaff' of the immortal * Tatler.' 
The lady was Mrs. Steele, nie Miss Mary Scur- 
lock, his ' Ruler ' and ' absolute Governesse ' 
(as he called her), to whom he had been married 
some eight months before. If you ask at the 
British Museum for the Steele manuscripts 
(Add. MSS. 5, 145 A, B, and C), the courteous 
attendant will bring you, with its faded ink, 
dusky paper, and hasty scrawl, the very letter 
making arrangements for this meeting (' best 
Periwigg ' and 'new Shoes 1 included), at the 
end of which the writer assures his ' dear Prue' 
(another pet name) that she is ' Vitall Life to 
Y r Oblig'd Affectionate Husband & Humble 
Ser nt Rich d Steele.' There are many such in 
the quarto volume of which this forms part, 
written from all places, at all times, in all kinds 
of hands. They take all tones ; they are pas- 
sionate, tender, expostulatory, playful, dignified, 
lyric, didactic. It must be confessed that from 
a perusal of them one's feeling for the lady of 
the chariot is not entirely unsympathetic. It 
can scarcely have been an ideal household, that 
' third door right hand turning out of Jermyn 



Steele's Letters. 13 

Street,' to which so many of them are ad- 
dressed ; and Mrs. Steele must frequently have 
had to complain to her confidante, Mrs. (or 
Miss) Binns (a lady whom Steele is obviously 
anxious to conciliate), of the extraordinary irre- 
gularity of her restless lord and master. Now 
a friend from Barbados has stopped him on his 
way home, and he will come (he writes) ' within 
a Pint of Wine ; ' now it is Lord Sunderland 
who is keeping him indefinitely at the Council ; 
now the siege of Lille and the proofs of the 
' Gazette ' will detain him until ten at night. 
Sometimes his vague ' West Indian business ' 
(that is, his first wife's property) hurries him 
suddenly into the City ; sometimes he is borne 
off to the Gentleman Usher's table at St. 
James's. Sometimes, even, he stays out all 
night, as he had done not many days before the 
date of the above meeting, when he had written 
to beg that his dressing-gown, his slippers, and 
1 clean Linnen ' might be sent to him at ' one 
Legg's,' a barber ' over against the Devill Tavern 
at Charing Crosse,' where he proposes to lie that 
night, chiefly, it has been conjectured from the 
context, in order to escape certain watchful 
' shoulder-dabbers ' who were hanging obsti- 
nately about his own mansion in St. James's. 
For — to tell the truth — he was generally hope- 



14 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

lessly embarrassed, and scarcely ever without 
a lawsuit on his hands. He was not a bad man ; 
he was not necessarily vicious or dissolute. But 
his habits were incurably generous, profuse, and 
improvident ; and his sanguine Irish nature led 
him continually to mistake his expectations for 
his income. Naturally, perhaps, his ' absolute 
Governesse ' complained of an absolutism so 
strangely limited. If her affection for him was 
scarcely as ardent as his passion for her, it was 
still a genuine emotion. But to a coquette of 
some years 1 standing, and ' a cried-up beauty ' 
(as Mrs. Manley calls her), the realities of her 
married life must have been a cruel disappoint- 
ment ; and she was not the woman to conceal 
it. ' I wish,' says her husband in one of his 
letters, ' I knew how to Court you into Good 
Humour, for Two or Three Quarrells more will 
dispatch me quite. 1 Of her replies we have no 
knowledge ; but from scattered specimens of 
her style when angry, they must often have been 
exceptionally scornful and unconciliatory. On 
one occasion, where he addresses her as 
' Madam,' and returns her note to her in order 
that she may see, upon second thoughts, the 
disrespectful manner in which she treats him, 
he is evidently deeply wounded. She has said 
that their dispute is far from being a trouble to 



Steele's Letters. 15 

her, and he rejoins that to him any disturbance 
between them is the greatest affliction imagi- 
nable. And then he goes on to expostulate, with 
more dignity than usual, against her unreason- 
able use of her prerogative. ' I Love you,' he 
says, ' better than the light of my Eyes, or the 
life-blood in my Heart but when I have lett 
you know that, you are also to understand that 
neither my sight shall be so far inchanted, or my 
affection so much master of me as to make me 
forgett our common Interest. To attend my 
businesse as I ought and improve my fortune 
it is necessary that my time and my Will should 
be under no direction but my own.' Clearly 
his bosom's queen had been inquiring too 
closely into his goings and comings. It is a 
strange thing, he says, in another letter, that, 
because she is handsome, he must be always 
giving her an account of every trifle, and minute 
of his time. And again — ' Dear Prue, do not 
send after me, for I shall be ridiculous ! ' It 
had happened to him, no doubt. ' He is gov- 
erned by his wife most abominably, as bad as 
Marlborough,' says another contemporary letter- 
writer. And we may fancy the blue eyes of 
Dr. Swift flashing unutterable scorn as he 
scribbles off this piece of intelligence to Stella 
and Mrs. Dingley. 



1 6 Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 

In the letters which follow Steele's above- 
quoted expostulation, the embers of misunder- 
standing flame and fade, to flame and fade again. 
A word or two of kindness makes him raptur- 
ous ; a harsh expression sinks him to despair. 
As time goes on, the letters grow fewer, and the 
writers grow more used to each other's ways. 
But to the last Steele's affectionate nature takes 
fire upon the least encouragement. Once, years 
afterwards, when Prue is in the country and he 
is in London, and she calls him ' Good Dick,' it 
throws him into such a transport that he de- 
clares he could forget his gout, and walk down 
to her at Wales. ' My dear little peevish, 
beautiful, wise Governess, God bless you,' the 
letter ends. In another he assures her that, 
lying in her place and on her pillow, he fell 
into tears from thinking that his ' charming little 
insolent might be then awake and in pain ' with 
headache. She wants flattery, she says, and he 
flatters her. ' Her son,' he declares, ' is ex- 
tremely pretty, and has his face sweetened with 
something of the Venus his mother, which is no 
small delight to the Vulcan who begot him.' 
He assures her that, though she talks of the 
children, they are dear to him more because 
they are hers than because they are his own. 1 

1 A few sentences in this paper are borrowed from the 
writer's ' Life of Steele.' 



Steele's Letters. ly 

And this reminds us that some of the best of 
his later letters are about his family. Once, at 
this time of their mother's absence in Wales, 
he says that he has invited his eldest daughter 
to dinner with one of her teachers, because she 
had represented to him ' in her pretty language 
that she seemed helpless and friendless, without 
anybody's taking notice of her at Christmas, when 
all the children but she and two more were with 
their relations.' So now they are in the room 
where he is writing. ' I told Betty,' he adds, 
* I had writ to you ; and she made me open the 
letter again, and give her humble duty to her 
mother, and desire to know when she shall have 
the honour to see her in town.' No doubt this 
was in strict accordance with the proprieties as 
practised at Mrs. Nazereau's polite academy 
in Chelsea ; but somehow one suspects that 
1 Madam Betty ' would scarcely have addressed 
the writer of the letter with the same boarding- 
school formality. Elsewhere the talk is all of 
Eugene, the eldest boy. ' Your son, at the 
present writing, is mighty well employed in 
tumbling on the floor of the room and sweeping 
the sand with a feather. He grows a most 
delightful child, and very full of play and spirit. 
He is also a very great scholar: he can read 
his Primer ; and I have brought down my 



1 8 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Virgil. He makes most shrewd remarks upon 
the pictures. We are very intimate friends and 
play-fellows.' Yes : decidedly Steele's children 
must have loved their clever, faulty, kindly 
father. 



PRIOR'S ' KITTY/ 

TN the year 171 8, and presumably after Mr. 
■*■ Matthew Prior had already printed his tall 
and extremely miscellaneous folio of ' Poems 
on Several Occasions,' there was published 
separately a little jeu d'esprit by the same * emi- 
nent Hand,' which has not been regarded as 
the least fortunate of his efforts. In its first 
fugitive form, now so rare as to be known only 
to a few highly-favoured collectors, it is a single 
page or leaf of eight quatrains ; and of this there 
are two issues, both attributing the verses to 
Prior, both claiming to be authentic, both un- 
authorized. The earlier, which is dated, is 
headed ' Upon Lady Katherine H — des first 
appearing at the Play-House in Drury-Lane ; ' 
the other, ' from Curll's chaste press,' bears the 
title of ' The Female Phaeton,' by which the 
piece is now known. The person indicated 
was the second daughter of Henry Hyde, Earl 
of Clarendon and Rochester, and the grandchild 
of the great Lord Chancellor and historian of 



20 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

the Rebellion. As she was born in 1700, she 
must at this time have been eighteen. She was 
'beautiful/ says the poet; ' she was wild as 
Colt untam'd ; ' she was, besides, 

' Inflam'd with Rage at sad Restraint, 
Which wise Mamma ordain'd.' 

Her elder sister, Jane — the 'blooming Hide, 
with Eyes so rare, 1 of whom John Gay had sung 
in the ' Prologue ' to ' The Shepherd's Week ' 
— was already married to the Earl of Essex. 
Why should not She, too, be a Toast, and 
1 bring home Hearts by Dozens ' ? 

' Dearest Mamma, for once let me, 
Unchain'd, my Fortune try ; 
I '11 have my Earl, as well as She, 
Or know the Reason why.' 

And so the stanzas, eternally human and there- 
fore eternally modern, dance and sparkle to 
their natural ending : 

* Fondness prevail'd, Mamma gave way ; 

Kitty, at Heart's Desire, 
Obtains the Chariot for a Day, 
And set the World on Fire.' 

Apart from the reference to Drury Lane 
Theatre supplied by the title, there is no clue 



Prior's 'Kitty.' 21 

to the incident recorded. But two years after 
Prior wrote these playful verses, which were 
sent to the lady through Mr. Harcourt, Cathe- 
rine Hyde verified her poet's words by securing 
a suitor of even higher rank than her sister's 
husband. In March, 1720, she married Charles 
Douglas, third Duke of Queensberry, an ami- 
able and accomplished nobleman, who, it has 
been hinted, must sometimes have been con- 
siderably ' exercised ' by the vagaries of the 
charming but impetuous i child of Nature ' 
whom he had selected for his helpmate. In- 
deed, despite her ability, many of her less 
sympathetic contemporaries did not scruple to 
suggest that her Grace's eccentricities almost 
amounted to a touch of insanity. Bolingbroke 
called her ' Sa Singularity ; ' Walpole spoke of 
her roundly as ' an out-pensioner of Bedlam.' 
But neither the Abbot of Strawberry nor Pope's 
' guide, philosopher, and friend ' had any right 
to set up for a Forbes-Winslow or a Brouardel ; 
and there is in reality little more in what is re- 
lated of her than might be expected of one who, 
at once a spoiled child, a beauty, and a woman 
of parts, deliberately revolted against the tyran- 
nous conventionalities of her time. To the last 
she persistently declined, as she told Swift, to 
" cut and curl her hair like a sheep's head," in 



22 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

accordance with the reigning fashion ; and she af- 
fected in her dress a simplicity and youthfulness 
which nothing but the good looks she contrived 
to retain so long, could possibly have justified. 
She had a fancy for idyllic travesties, appearing 
now as a shepherdess, now as a peasant, now 
as a milkmaid. 1 Upon one occasion she scan- 
dalized the court-usher soul of Horace Walpole 
by masquerading at St. James's in a costume of 
red flannel. As a rule, she carried her innova- 
tions triumphantly ; but now and then she was 
forced to yield to a will more imperative than 
her own. Once the fantastic old King of Bath 
tore off her favourite white apron in the Pump 
Room, flinging it contemptuously among the 
' waiting gentlewomen ■ in the hinder benches. 
( None but abigails wore white aprons,' he de- 
clared ; and the grande dame de par le monde 
made a virtue of a necessity, and submitted. In 
her own entertainments, however, she seems to 
have been as despotic as Nash, insisting that 
people should come early and leave early, and 
declining to provide the profuse refreshments 
then expected. High-spirited and whimsical no 
doubt she was ; but the stories told of her are 

1 In this last character Charles Jervas painted her. 
The picture is in the National Portrait Gallery. She 
has hazel eyes and dark-brown hair. 



Prior's 'Kitty.' 23 

probably exaggerated. Those who praise her, 
praise her unreservedly. Her character was 
unblemished. She was truthful ; she was 
honest ; she was not a flatterer. And she 
was certainly fearless, for she dared, even in 
the rudimentary epoch of the two-pronged fork, 
to rally the terrible Dean of St. Patrick's for 
that deplorable habit — so justly deprecated by 
the Historian of Snobs — of putting his knife in 
his mouth. When she saw any one ' administer 
the cold steel/ as Thackeray calls it, she would 
shriek out in affected terror lest they should do 
themselves a mischief. She seems, although 
they never really met after her girlhood, to have 
wholly subjugated Swift, whose final tone to 
her comes perilously close to that fulsome adu- 
lation which, in others, stirred his fiercest scorn. 
1 I will excuse your blots upon paper,' he says, 
writing to her after Gay's death, ' because they 
are the only blots you ever did, or ever will 
make, in the whole course of your life.' Further 
on he refers ' to the universal, almost idolatrous 
esteem you have forced from every person in 
two kingdoms, who have the least regard for 
virtue.' It is her peculiar art, he tells her again, 
to bribe * all wise and good men to be her flat- 
terers,' Swift was no paragon ; but the praise 
of Swift outweighs the sneers of Walpole. 



24 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

She was the friend of men of letters — this 
capricious great lady, and they have judged her 
best. To Swift in particular it was an attrac- 
tion that she loved and befriended his favourite 
Gay. The earlier part of the brief correspond- 
ence from which the above quotation is bor- 
rowed, shows the Duchess in her most amiable 
light ; and it was with Gay that it originated. 
From the days of her marriage she had protected 
and petted that fat and feckless fabulist ; she 
had championed him in the matter of his second 
ballad-opera in such a way as to procure her 
own exile from Court ; and at the time she be- 
gan to write to Swift, Gay was domiciled at the 
Duke's country house at Ambresbury, or Ames- 
bury, near Salisbury, in Wiltshire. Gay begins 
by sending Swift the Duchess's ' services,' and 
by wishing on his own account that Swift could 
come to England, — could come to Amesbury. 
Swift replies with conventional acknowledgment 
of the civility of the lady, whom he had not seen 
since she was a girl. He hears an ill thing of 
her, he says — that she is matre pulchrd filia 
pulchrior, and he would be angry she should ex- 
cel her mother (Jane Leveson Gower), who, of 
old, had long been his e principal goddess.' In 
the letter that succeeds, the Duchess herself 
adds a postscript to confirm Gay's invitation. 



Prior's 'Kitty! 25 

1 I would fain have you come, 1 she writes. ' I 
can't say you '11 be welcome ; for I don't know 
you, and perhaps I shall not like you ; but if I 
do not (unless you are a very vain person), you 
shall know my thoughts as soon as I do myself.' 
No mode of address could have suited Swift's 
humour better ; and part of his next epistle to 
Gay replies to her challenge in the true Swiftian 
style. He begins very low down on the page — 
1 as a mark of respect, like receiving her Grace 
at the bottom of the stairs.' He goes on with 
a protest for form's sake against the imperious 
manner of her advances ; but he argues in- 
geniously that she must like him, since they are 
both unpopular with the Queen. If he comes, 
' he will,' he adds, ' out of fear and prudence, 
appear as vain as he can, that he may not know 
her thoughts of him.' His closing sentences 
are in Malvolio's manner. ' This is your own 
direction, but it was needless. For Diogenes 
himself would be vain, to have received the 
honour of being one moment of his life in the 
thoughts of your grace.' 

After this, Us dpies s'engagent. As to the 
correspondence that ensued, opinions differ 
widely. Warton discovered ' exquisite humour 
and pleasantry' in Swift's ' affected bluntness,' 
and compares him to Voiture, — to Waller writ- 



26 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

ing to Saccharissa on her marriage. Later 
editors are less enthusiastic, regarding the whole 
series of letters as ' empty, laboured, and child- 
ish on both sides.' Each of these verdicts is 
extreme. Swift tempering candour by compli- 
ment, is an unusual but not an impossible spec- 
tacle ; while the Duchess writes exactly as one 
would expect her to write with Swift's fast friend 
at her elbow. Gay, knowing that she will 
probably follow him, warns Swift playfully that 
she has her antipathies, — that she likes her own 
way, — that she is very frank, and that in any 
dispute he must take her side. Thereupon 
her Grace takes up the pen herself : 

1 Write I must, particularly now, as I have an 
opportunity to indulge my predominant passion 
of contradiction. I do, in the first place, con- 
tradict most things Mr. Gay says of me, to deter 
you from coming here ; which if you ever do, 
I hereby assure you, that, unless I like my own 
way better, you shall have yours ; and in all 
disputes you shall convince me, if you can. 
But, by what I see of you, this is not a misfor- 
tune, that will always happen ; for I find you are 
a great mistaken For example, you take pru- 
dence for imperiousness : 't is from this first 
that I determined not to like one, who is too 



Prior's 'Kitty.' 27 

giddy-headed for me to be certain whether or 
no I shall ever be acquainted with [him]. I 
have known people take great delight in building 
castles in the air ; but I should choose to build 
friends upon a more solid foundation. I would 
fain know you ; for I often hear more good 
likable things [of you] than 't is possible any 
one can deserve. Pray, come, that I may find 
out something wrong ; for I, and I believe most 
women, have an inconceivable pleasure to find 
out any faults, except their own. Mr. Cibber 
is made poet laureat. 1 I am, Sir, as much your 
humble servant as I can be to any person I 
don't know. 

C,Q. 
1 P. S. Mr. Gay is very peevish that I spell 
and write ill ; but I don't care : for neither the 
pen nor I can do better. Besides, I think you 
have flattered me, and such people ought to be 
put to trouble.' 

That this fashion of writing, so new to him, 
should not have captivated Swift, is impossible. 
He could not accept the invitation ; but at least 

1 • Harmonious Cibber entertains 

The Court with annual Birth-day Strains ; 
Whence Gay was banish'd in Disgrace.' 

Swift, On Poetry: a Rhapsody, 1733, 



28 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

he could prolong the correspondence. In his 
next letter he enters upon preliminaries. He is 
old, dull, peevish, perverse, morose. Has she 
a clear voice ? — and will she let him sit at her 
left hand, for his right ear is the better? Can 
the parson of the parish play at backgammon, 
and hold his tongue ? Has she a good nurse 
among her women, in case he should fancy him- 
self sick > How long will she maintain him and 
his equipage if he comes ? A week or two later, 
in the form of another postscript to Gay, follows 
the reply of the Duchess : 

1 It was Mr. Gay's fault that I did not write 
sooner ; which if I had, I should hope you 
would have been here by this time ; for I have 
to tell you, all your articles are agreed to; and 
that I only love my own way, when I meet not 
with others whose ways I like better. I am in 
great hopes that I shall approve of yours ; for 
to tell you the truth, I am at present a little 
tired of my own. I have not a clear or distinct 
voice, except when I am angry ; but I am a 
very good nurse, when people don't fancy 
themselves sick. Mr. Gay knows this ; and 
he knows too how to play at backgammon. 
Whether the parson of the parish can, I know 
not ; but if he cannot hold his tongue, I can. 



Priors 'Kitty.' 29 

Pray set out the first fair wind, and stay with 
us as long as ever you please. I cannot name 
my fixed time, that I shall like to maintain you 
and your equipage ; but if I don't happen to 
like you, I know I can so far govern my temper 
as to endure you for about five days. So come 
away directly ; at all hazards you '11 be allowed 
a good breathing time. I shall make no sort of 
respectful conclusions ; for till I know you, I 
cannot tell what I am to you.' 

And so the correspondence, always conducted 
on the one side by Gay and his kind protectress, 
or Gay and the Duke, protracts itself until ar- 
rives to Swift that fatal missive from Pope and 
Arbuthnot announcing Gay's sudden death, — a 
missive which, overmastered by a foreboding of 
its contents, he kept unopened for days. At a 
later date some further communications followed 
between Swift and the Duchess. But he liked 
best her postscripts to his dead friend's letters. 
1 They made up,' he told Pope unaffectedly, 
' a great part of the little happiness I could have 
here.' 

Swift survived Gay for nearly fifteen years, 
and the Duchess lived far into the reign of 
George the Third. In the changing procession 
of Walpole's pages one gets glimpses of her from 



30 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

time to time, generally emphasised by some 
malicious anecdote or epithet. At the corona- 
tion she returned to Court, appearing with per- 
fectly white hair. Yet, four years before her 
death, Walpole says of her that (by twilight) 
you would ' sooner take her for a young beauty 
of an old-fashioned century than for an anti- 
quated goddess of this age.' Indeed her all- 
conquering charms seduced him into panegyric ; 
and one day in 1771, she found these verses on 
her toilet-table, wrung from her most persistent 
detractor : 

' To many a Kitty, Love his car 

Will for a day engage, 
But Prior's Kitty, ever fair, 
Obtained it for an age I ' 

She was then seventy-one. In later life she 
was often at her seat of Drumlanrig, in Dum- 
friesshire ; and Scott in his ' Journal,' under 
date of August, 1826, speaks of the ' Walk ' by 
the river Nith which she had formed, and which 
still went by her name. Her peculiarities, over 
which her friend Mrs. Delany sighs plaintively, 
did not abate with age ; but her kind heart re- 
mained. She died in Savile Row in 1777, 
of a surfeit of cherries, and was buried at 
Durrisdeer. 



SPENCE'S < ANECDOTES.' 

"\17"HEN, in the year 1741, after his quarrel 
* * with Gray, Horace Walpole lay sick of 
a quinsy at Reggio, the shearing of his thin-spun 
life was only postponed by the opportune inter- 
vention of a passing acquaintance. The Rev. 
Joseph Spence, Fellow of New College, Oxford, 
and Professor of Poetry to that University, then 
travelling in Italy as Governor to Henry Clinton, 
Earl of Lincoln, promptly arrived to his aid, 
summoned Dr. Cocchi post-haste from Florence, 
and thus became instrumental in enabling the 
Prince of Letter-Writers to expand the thirty or 
forty epistles he had already produced into that 
magnificent correspondence which, incomplete 
even now, extends to nine closely printed vol- 
umes. Spence, to whom all Walpole's admirers 
owe a lasting debt of gratitude, was one of the 
fortunate men of a fortunate literary age. In 
1726 he had published a ' genteel' critique of 
Pope's ' Odyssey,' conspicuous for its courte- 
ous mingling of praise and blame, and not the 
less grateful to the person criticised because — 



32 Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 

as Bennet Langton said, and as good luck would 
have it — ten out of the twelve objections fell 
upon the labours of Pope's luckless coadjutors, 
Broome and Fenton. The book made Pope 
his friend, and himself Professor of Poetry, in 
which capacity he patronised Thomson, and pro- 
tected Queen Caroline's thresher-laureate, Ste- 
phen Duck. During the continental tours which 
he undertook in 1730 and 1737, and in that above 
referred to, he collected the material for his 
' Polymetis,' a tall folio on classical mythology, 
the earlier editions of which are now chiefly 
sought after for their irreverent vignette of Dr. 
Cooke, propositor of Eton, in the disguise of ' an 
ass's nowl.' Spence continued to dally lightly 
with letters, editing Sackville's ' Gorboduc,' 
annotating Virgil, writing a life of the blind poet 
Blacklock, and comparing (after the manner of 
Plutarch), for Walpole's private press at Straw- 
berry, Mr. Robert Hill, the 'learned tailor' 
of Buckingham, with that Florentine helluo libro- 
rum, Signor Antonio Magliabecchi. He lived 
the mildly studious life of a quiet, easy-going 
clergyman of the eighteenth century, nursing a 
widowed mother like Pope, and declining to 
disturb the placid ripple of his days by the 
'violent delights' of matrimony. He is 'the 
completest scholar,' ' the sweetest tempered 



Spences 'Anecdotes.' 33 

gentleman breathing,' cries his enthusiastic 
friend, Mr. Christopher Pitt, himself a virtuoso 
and a translator of Homer. He is ' extremely 
polite, friendly, cheerful, and master of an infi- 
nite fund of subjects for agreeable conversa- 
tion, 1 says Mr. Shenstone of the Leasowes. 
4 He was a good-natured, harmless little soul, 
but more like a silver penny than a genius,' 
says ungrateful Mr. Walpole. ' He was a poor 
creature, though a very worthy man,' says 
clever Mr. Cambridge of the ' World ' and the 
f Scribleriad.' To strike an average between 
these varying estimates is not a difficult task. It 
gives us a character amiable rather than strong, 
finical rather than earnest, well-informed and 
ingenious rather than positively learned. For 
the rest, ' Polymetis ' has been supplanted by 
Lempriere, and is as dead as Stephen Duck ; 
and its author lives now by the ' priefs ' which, 
like Sir Hugh Evans, he made in his note-book, 
— in other words, by the Anecdotes of the Lit- 
erary Men of his age, which, when occasion of- 
fered, he jotted down from the conversation of 
Pope, Young, Dean Lockier, and other notabili- 
ties into whose company he came from time to 
time. 

The story of Spence's * Anecdotes ' is a che- 
quered one. At their author's death they were 

3 



34 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

still in manuscript, though their existence was 
an open secret. Joseph Warton had hand- 
selled them for his ' Essay on Pope ; ' and War- 
burton had used them for Ruffhead's ' Life.' 
When Spence died in 1768, it was discovered 
that he had himself intended to print them, — 
that he had, in fact, conditionally sold a selec- 
tion of them to Robert Dodsley, the bookseller 
(whom he had formerly befriended), for a hun- 
dred pounds. But before publication was fi- 
nally arranged both Spence and Robert Dodsley 
died. Spence's executors — Bishop Lowth, Dr. 
Ridley and Mr. Rolle — thought suppression 
for a time desirable ; and the surviving Dodsley, 
James, although, says Joseph Warton, ' he prob- 
ably would have gained 400/. or 500/. by it,' was 
easily prevailed upon, out of regard for Spence, 
to relinquish the bargain. The manuscript selec- 
tion was then presented by the executors to 
Spence's old pupil, Lord Lincoln, who had be- 
come Duke of Newcastle, while the original 
'Anecdotes,' and a fair copy, remained in Bishop 
Lowth's possession. The Newcastle MS. was 
lent to Johnson, who employed it for his ' Lives 
of the Poets, 1 giving great offence to the Duke 
by acknowledging the loan without mentioning 
the name of the lender ; and Malonehad access 
to it for his Dryden, at the same time compiling 



Spence's 'Anecdotes,' 35 

from it a smaller selection, which he annotated 
briefly. By a series of circumstances too lengthy 
to detail, this last, some years after Malone's 
death, passed into the hands of Mr. John Mur- 
ray, who published it in 1820. In the same 
year, and, by a curious coincidence, upon the 
same day, appeared another edition based upon 
the Lowth papers, which had also found their 
way into other hands. This was prefaced and 
annotated by Mr. S. W. Singer, and a second 
edition of it was issued in 1858 by J. R. Smith. 
Beyond these three editions of the ' Anecdotes, 1 
there has been no other reprint but the excellent 
little selection in the ' Camelot ' series which 
Mr. John Underhill put forth in 1890. 

As will be gathered from the above, Spence's 
own selection is still unpublished, and is sup- 
posed to remain in the possession of the New- 
castle family. But as Malone extracted all of it 
that he thought worth keeping, and as Singer 
printed the materials on which it was based, it 
is not likely that its publication now, even if 
it were found to be practicable, would be of 
material interest, except to show what Spence 
personally regarded as deserving of preserva- 
tion. With respect to the * Anecdotes' them- 
selves, there can be little doubt that, whatever 
their subsequent extension may have been, they 



36 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

originated in Spence's acquaintanceship with 
Pope ; and that their first purpose was the bring- 
ing together of such dispersed data as might 
serve for the basis of his biography. (So much, 
in fact, Spence told Warburton when they were 
returning from Twickenham after Pope's death ; 
and then, like the courteous, amiable ' silver 
penny ' that he was, surrendered all his memo- 
randa to his more pretentious companion, in 
whose subsequent ' Life, 1 for Ruffhead's ' Life 
of Pope ' is really Warburton's, nearly every 
anecdote of value is derived from Spence.) 
From collecting Popiana to collecting ana of 
Pope's contemporaries, would be a natural step ; 
and it would be but a step farther to add, from 
time to time, such supplementary notes or im- 
pressions de voyage as presented themselves, 
even if they had no special connection with the 
primary matter, which is Pope and Pope's 
doings. Indeed, in Singer's opinion, Spence's 
* Anecdotes ' already contain, not only ' a com- 
plete though brief autobiography ' of the poet, 
but also ■ the most exact record of his opin- 
ions on important topics,' — a record which is 
1 probably the more genuine and undisguised, 
because not premeditated, but elicited by the 
impulse of the moment.' 
This, as far as it relates to Pope's views on 



Spence s 'Anecdotes.' 37 

abstract literary questions, is no doubt true ; 
but ' genuine/ ' undisguised,' and ' unpremedi- 
tated ' are scarcely the epithets which mod- 
ern criticism has taught us to apply to some, 
at least, of Pope's utterances concerning his 
contemporaries ; and in these respects we are 
more exactly informed than the Oxford Pro- 
fessor of Poetry. Take, for instance, the well- 
known Wycherley correspondence. ' People 
have pitied you extremely,' says sympathetic 
Mr. Spence, who professes to speak verbatim, 
'on reading your letters to Wycherley [i.e., 
the correspondence which Pope had printed] ; 
surely 'twas a very difficult thing for you to 
keep well with him I ' And thereupon Mr. Pope, 
of Twickenham and Parnassus, replies that ' it 
was the most difficult thing in the world ; ' that he 
4 was extremely plagued up and down, for al- 
most two years,' with Wycherley's verses ; that 
Wycherley was really angry at having them so 
much corrected ; that his memory was entirely 
gone, — and so forth. 1 All of which Mr. 
Spence confidingly transfers to his tablets. But 

1 He did not tell Spence (as he might have done) that 
his own ' Damn with faint praise ' was borrowed from 
the man he was decrying. ' And with faint praises 
one another damn/ is a line in one of Wycherley's 
prologues. 



38 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

thanks to the publication by Mr. Courthope in 
1889, from the manuscripts at Longleat, of most 
of Wycherley's autograph letters, we now know 
that the correspondence to which Spence re- 
ferred had been considerably ' edited ' by Pope 
with the view of misrepresenting his dealings 
with Wycherley ; and there is even something 
more than a suspicion that he actually concocted 
those of Wycherley's letters for which there are 
no equivalent vouchers in the Marquis of Bath's 
collection. In any case, the real documents 
show clearly that, instead of resenting the amend- 
ments and alterations of his ' Deare Little In- 
fallible/ as he calls him, the old dramatist 
received them with effusive gratitude ; and, far 
from reproaching the poet for neglecting to visit 
him (which Pope implied), constantly delayed 
or postponed his own visits to Pope at Bin- 
field ; — in short, did, in reality, just the very 
reverse of what he is represented as doing in 
Pope's garbled correspondence. So that, in 
these worshipful communiques to Spence, Pope 
must simply have been playing at that eigh- 
teenth-century pastime to which Swift refers 
in the ' Polite Conversation ' as ' Selling a 
Bargain.' 

In Pope's life, it is to be feared, there were not 
a few of these equivocal mercantile transactions. 



Spence s 'Anecdotes.' 39 

He certainly imposed on Spence's credulity 
when he told him that * there was a design 
which does not generally appear,' in other 
words, a cryptic significance, in his correspond- 
ence with Henry Cromwell. And he also, 
with equal certainty, disposed of ' a great Penny- 
worth' (in the current phrase) when he gave 
him the — from his own point of view — emi- 
nently plausible account of the circumstances 
which led to the notorious character of ' Atti- 
cus.' Whether Spence, who could not be said 
to be unwarned, since he records Addison's 
caution to Lady Mary against Pope's ' devilish 
tricks,' had any lurking suspicion that Pope was 
not to be relied upon, does not appear. But 
it is obvious that, without Spence's ' Anecdotes,' 
Pope's biographers would have played but a 
sorry figure. From Spence it is that we get the 
best account of Pope's precocious early years 
and studies ; of his boyish epic of Alcander, 
Prince of Rhodes, with its under-water scene, 
and its four books of one thousand lines ; of 
the manner of his translation of Homer and his 
plan for the ' Essay on Man ; ' and of a num- 
ber of facts concerning the trustworthiness of 
which there can be no reasonable doubt. Nor 
can there be any doubt as to the bulk of his 
purely critical utterances. Many of these, and 



40 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

especially such as deal with individual authors, 
are now become trite and faded. However 
novel may have been the announcement under 
George the Second, we now learn without a 
shock of surprise that Chaucer is an unequalled 
tale-teller, that Bacon v/as a great genius, that 
Milton's style is exotic. But, upon his own 
craft, Pope's axioms are still sometimes worth 
hearing. ; A poem on a slight subject/ he says, 
1 requires the greater care to make it consider- 
able enough to be read.' ' After writing a 
poem one should correct it all over, with one 
single view at a time. Thus, for language : if 
an elegy, " These lines are very good, but are 
they not of too heroical a strain ? " and so vice 
versa.' ' There is nothing so foolish as to pre- 
tend to be sure of knowing a great writer by 
his style.' ' Nil admirari is as true in relation 
to our opinions of authors as it is in morality ; 
and one may say, O, admiratores, servum pecus! 
fully as justly as O, Imitatores / ' ' The great 
secret how to write well is to know thoroughly 
what one writes about, and not to be affected.' 1 
This last, however, is scarcely more than an 
Horatian commonplace. 

With the aid of Spence's ' Anecdotes ' we 
gain admission to the little villa by the Thames 
where, during the spring of 1744, wasted by an 



Spence s 'Anecdotes.' 41 

intolerable asthma, but waiting serenely for the 
end, Pope lay sinking slowly. Many of his 
sayings, and the sayings of those who visited his 
sick-room, have their only chronicle in this col- 
lection. About three weeks before his death, 
he printed his ' Ethic Epistles, 1 copies of which 
he gave away to different persons. ' Here am 
I, like Socrates,' he told Spence, 'distributing 
my morality to my friends, just as I am dying/ 
On Sunday, the 6th of May, he lost his mind 
for several hours, — a circumstance which sets 
him wondering ' that there should be such a 
thing as human vanity. 1 Already his spirit was 
escaping fitfully to the Unknown. There are 
false colours on the objects about him ; he looks 
at everything ' as through a curtain ; ' he sees 
1 a vision. 1 Most of all he suffers from his ina- 
bility to think. But the old love of letters still 
survives ; he quotes his own verses ; and when 
in his waking moments Spence reads to him the 
* Daphnis and Chloe ' of Longus, he marvels 
how the infected mind of the Regent Orleans 
can have relished so innocent a book. As to 
his condition he has no illusions. On the 1 5th, 
after having been visited by Thompson the 
quack, who had been treating him (as Ward 
treated Fielding) for dropsy, and professed to 
find him better, he described himself to Lyttel- 



42 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

ton as ' dying of a hundred good symptoms ! ' * 
' On every catching and recovery of his mind/ 
Spence tells us, ' he was always saying some- 
thing kindly either of his present or his absent 
friends ' — 'as if his humanity had outlived his 
understanding.' Many of the well-known fig- 
ures of the day still came and went about his 
bedside — Bolingbroke from Battersea, tearful 
and melancholy, full-blown Warburton, Lyttel- 
ton above-mentioned, Marchmont, blue-eyed 
Martha Blount ; and it was ' very observable ' 
how the entry of the lady seemed to give him 
temporary strength, or a new turn of spirits. 
To the last he continued to struggle manfully 
with his malady. On the 27th, to the dismay 
of his friends, he had himself brought down to 
the room where they were at dinner ; on the 
28th his sedan chair was carried for three hours 
into the garden he loved so well, then filled 
with the blossoms of May and smelling of the 
coming summer. On the 29th he took the air 
in Bushey Park, and a little later in the day re- 
ceived the sacrament, flinging himself fervently 
out of bed to receive it on his knees. * There 
is nothing that is meritorious, ' he said after- 

1 This must have been a commonplace. ' We are expir- 
ing " of a hundred good symptoms," ' says Swift, in the 
1 Conduct of the Allies,' 1711. 



Spences 'Anecdotes/ 43 

wards, ' but virtue and friendship, and indeed 
friendship itself is only a part of virtue.' On 
the next day, the 30th of May, 1744, he died. 
1 They did not know the exact time,' writes 
the faithful friend to whom we owe so many of 
these ' trivial, fond records,' — * for his depart- 
ure was so easy that it was imperceptible even 
to the standers-by.' 



CAPTAIN CORAM'S CHARITY. 

A MONG a ragged regiment of books, very 
■^^ dear to their owner, but in whose dilapi- 
dated company no reputable volume would 
greatly care to travel through Coventry, is a 
sheepskin-clad tract entitled ' Memoires Relat- 
ing to the State of the Royal Navy of England, 
For Ten Years, Determin'd December, 1688. ' 
It dates from those antiquated days when even 
statistics had their air of scholarship, and their, 
motto from 'Tully'or 'the Antients' (Quid 
Dulcius Otlo Litter ato I — it is in this case); 
and the year of issue is 1690. The name of the 
author does not appear, but his portrait by 
Kneller does ; and he was none other than the 
diarist Samuel Pepys, sometime Secretary to the 
Admiralty under the second Charles and his 
successor. In itself the little volume is an 
extremely instructive one, as much from the 
light it throws upon the prominent part played 
by its writer in the reconstruction of the Caro- 
line navy, as from its exposure of the lamentable 
mismanagement which permitted toadstools as 



Captain Coram's Charity, 45 

big as Mr. Secretary's fists to flourish freely in 
the ill-ventilated holds of his Majesty's ships-of- 
war. But the special attraction of the particular 
copy to which we are referring lies in certain 
faded inscriptions which it contains. On March 
14, 1724, it was presented by one ' C. Jackson' 
to ' Tho. Coram,' by whom in turn it was 
transferred to a Mr. Mills, being accompanied 
by a holograph note which is pasted at the end : 
' To M r Mills These Worthy Sir I happend 
to find among my few Books, Mr Pepps, his 
memoires [there has evidently been a struggle 
over the spelling of the name], w ch I thought 
might be acceptable to you & therefore pray you 
to accept of it. I am w th much Respect Sir 
your most humble Ser' Thomas Coram. June 
10 th , 1746.' It is not a lengthy document, but, 
with its unaffected wording and its simple refer- 
ence to ' my few Books,' it gives a pleasant 
impression of the brave old mariner to whom, 
even at the present day, so many hapless mortals 
owe their all ; and whose ruddy, kindly face, 
with its curling white hair, still beams on us 
from Hogarth's canvas at the Foundling. 

Captain Coram must have been seventy-eight 
years old when he wrote the above letter, for he 
had been born, at Lyme Regis in Dorsetshire, 
as far back as 1668. Of his boyhood nothing is 



46 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

known ; but in 1694 he was working as a ship- 
wright at Taunton, Massachusetts. His bene- 
volent instincts seem to have developed early, 
for in December, 1703, he conveyed to the 
Taunton authorities some fifty-nine acres of 
land as the site for a church or schoolhouse. 
In the deed of gift he is described as ' of Bos- 
ton, in New England, sometimes residing in 
Taunton, in the County of Bristol, Shipwright.' 
He also gave a library to Taunton ; and, from 
the fact that the Common Prayer Book used in 
the church of that town was presented to him 
for the purpose by Mr. Speaker Onslow, must 
have been successful in enlisting in his good 
offices the sympathies of others. In course of 
time he became master of a ship ; and, in 1 719, 
a glimpse of his life, of which there are scant 
details, shows him being plundered and mal- 
treated by wreckers at Cuxhaven, while a pas- 
senger on a vessel called the ' Sea Flower, 1 upon 
which occasion the affidavit describes him as 
' of London, Mariner and Shipwright.' At this 
date he was engaged in the supply of stores to 
the navy. He must have prospered fairly in his 
calling, for he soon afterwards retired from a 
seafaring life in order to live upon his means, 
and occupy himself entirely with charitable ob- 
jects. In the Plantations, as they were then 



Captain Coram 's Charity. 47 

called, he took great interest ; being notably 
active as regards the colonization of Georgia 
and the improvement of the Nova Scotian cod 
fisheries. Lord Walpole of Wolterton (Horace 
Walpole's uncle), who had met him, testified 
warmly to his honesty, his disinterestedness, and 
his knowledge of his subject. Neither an edu- 
cated nor a polished man (and not always a 
judicious one), he was indefatigable in the pur- 
suit of his purpose, and his single-minded phil- 
anthropy was beyond the shadow of a doubt. 
' His arguments,' said his intimate friend Dr. 
Brocklesby, ' were nervous, though not nice — 
founded commonly upon facts, and the conse- 
quences that he drew, so closely connected with 
them, as to need no further proof than a fair 
explanation. When once he made an impres- 
sion, he took care it should not wear out ; for he 
enforced it continually by the most pathetic re- 
monstrances. In short, his logic was plain 
sense ; his eloquence, the natural language of 
the heart.' 

His crowning enterprise was the obtaining of 
a charter for the establishment of the Foundling 
Hospital. Going to and fro at Rotherhithe, 
where in his latter days he lived, he was con- 
stantly coming upon half-clad infants, ' some- 
times alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes 



48 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

dying,' who had been abandoned by their 
parents to the mercy of the streets ; and he 
determined to devote his energies to the pro- 
curing of a public institution in which they 
might find an asylum. For seventeen years, 
with an unconquerable tenacity, and in the face 
of the most obstinate obstruction, apathy, and 
even contempt, he continued to urge his suit 
upon the public, being at last rewarded by a 
Royal charter and the subscription of sufficient 
funds to commence operations. An estate of 
fifty-six acres was bought in Lamb's Conduit 
Fields for ^"3,500 ; and the building of the Hos- 
pital was begun from the plans of Theodore 
Jacobsen. Among its early Governors were 
many contemporary artists who contributed 
freely to its adornment, thereby, according to 
the received tradition, sowing the seed of the 
existing Royal Academy. Handel, too, was 
one of its noblest benefactors. For several 
years he regularly superintended an annual per- 
formance of the ' Messiah ' in the Chapel (an 
act which produced no less than ^7,000 to the 
institution), and he also presented it with an 
organ. Having opened informally in 1741 at a 
house in Hatton Garden, the Governors moved 
into the new building at the completion of the 
west wing in 1745. But already their good 



Captain Coram' s Charity. 49 

offices had begun to be abused. Consigning 
children to the Foundling was too convenient a 
way of disposing of them ; and, even in the 
Hatton Garden period, the supply had been 
drawn, not from London alone, but from all 
parts of the Kingdom. It became a lucrative 
trade to convey infants from remote country 
places to the undiscriminating care of the 
Charity. Once a waggoner brought eight to 
town, seven of whom were dead when they 
reached their destination. On another occasion 
a man with five in baskets got drunk on the 
road, and three of his charges were suffocated. 
The inevitable outcome of this was that the 
Governors speedily discovered they were ad- 
mitting far more inmates than they could possibly 
afford to maintain. They accordingly applied to 
Parliament, who voted them ^"10,000, but at the 
same time crippled them with the obligation to 
receive all comers. A basket was forthwith 
hung at the gate, with the result that, on the 
first day of its appearance, no less than 117 in- 
fants were successively deposited in it. That 
this extraordinary development of the intentions 
of the projectors could continue to work satis- 
factorily was of course impossible, and great 
mortality ensued. As time went on, however, 
a wise restriction prevailed ; and the Hospital 

4 



50 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

now exists solely for those unmarried mothers 
whose previous character has been good, and 
whose desire to reform is believed to be sincere. 
Fortunately, long before the era of what one of 
the accounts calls its ' frightful efflorescence ' — 
an efflorescence which, moreover, could never 
have occurred under Captain Coram's original 
conditions — its benevolent founder had been 
laid to rest in its precincts. After his wife's 
death he fell into difficulties, and subscriptions 
were collected for his benefit. When this was 
broken to the old man — too modest himself to 
plead his own cause, and too proud to parade 
his necessity — he made, according to Hawkins, 
the following memorable answer to Dr. Brock- 
lesby : ' I have not wasted the little wealth of 
which I was formerly possessed in self-indul- 
gence, or vain expenses, and am not ashamed 
to confess, that in this my old age I am poor.' 

Although the Sunday services are still well at- 
tended, Captain Coram's Charity is no longer 
the ' fashionable morning lounge ' it was in the 
Georgian era, when, we are told, the grounds 
were crowded daily with brocaded silks, gold- 
headed canes, and three-cornered hats of the 
orthodox Egham, Staines, or Windsor pattern. 
No members of the Royal Academy now assem- 
ble periodically round the historical blue dragon 



Captain Coram' s Charity. 51 

punch-bowl, still religiously preserved, over 
which Hogarth and Lambert and Highmore and 
the other pictorial patrons of the place must of- 
ten have chirruped ' Life a Bubble,' or ' Drink 
and Agree,' at their annual dinners ; neither is 
there of our day any munificent maestro like 
Handel to present the institution with a new 
organ or the original score of an oratorio. But 
if you enter to the left of Mr. Calder Marshall's 
statue at the gate in Guildford Street, you shall 
still find the enclosure dotted with red-coated 
boys playing at cricket, and with girls in white 
caps ; and in the quiet, unpretentious building 
itself are many time-honoured relics of its past. 
Here, for example, is one of Hogarth's contri- 
butions to his friend's enterprise, the ' March of 
the Guards towards Scotland, in the year 174$,' 
commonly called the ' March to Finchley ' — 
that famous performance for which King George 
the Second of irate memory said he ought to 
be ' bicketed,' and which the artist, in a rage, 
forthwith dedicated to the King of Prusia, 
with one ' s.' A century and a half has passed 
since it was executed, but it is still in excellent 
preservation, having of late years, for greater 
precaution, been placed under glass. 1 Here, 

1 It was disposed of in 1750 by raffle or lottery. ' Yes- 
terday,' — says the ' General Advertiser ' for 1 May in that 



52 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

too, is the already mentioned full-length of the 
founder — a portrait of the masterly qualities 
and superb colouring of which neither McAr- 
dell's mezzotint nor Nutter's stipple gives any 
adequate idea. Here, again, is one of Hogarth's 
1 failures, 1 the ' Moses Brought to Pharaoh's 
Daughter,' which is not so great a failure after 
all. Certainly it compares favourably with the 
4 Finding of Moses' by the professed history- 
painter, Frank Hayman, which hangs hard by, 
and is an utterly bald and lifeless production. 
On the contrary, in Hogarth's picture, the ex- 
pression in the eyes of the mother, which linger 
on the child as her hand mechanically receives 
the money, is one of those touches which make 
the whole world kin. Among the circular paint- 
ings of similar charities is a charming little 
Gainsborough of the Charterhouse, while the 
' Foundling ' and ' St. George's Hospital ' are 
from the brush of Richard Wilson. There is a 
dignified portrait of Handel by Kneller, which 
makes one wonder how the caricaturists could 

year, — 'Mr. Hogarth's Subscription was closed. 1843 
chances being subscrib'd for, M r Hogarth gave the re- 
maining 167 chances to the Foundling Hospital. At two 
o'clock the Box was opened, and the fortunate chance 
was N° 194.T, which belongs to the said Hospital ; and 
the same night Mr Hogarth delivered the Picture to 
the Governors.' 



Captain Coram s Charity. 53 

ever have distorted him into the ' Charming 
Brute ; ' and also a bust by Roubillac, being the 
original model for the statues in Westminster 
Abbey and Old Vauxhall Gardens. There are 
autographs of Hogarth and Coram and John 
Wilkes the demagogue ; there is a copy of his 
' Christmas Stories ' presented by the author, 
Charles Dickens ; there is a case in one of the 
windows full of the queer, forlorn ' marks or 
tokens' which, in the basket days, were found 
attached to its helpless inmates — ivory fish, sil- 
ver coins of Queen Anne or James, scraps of 
paper with doggerel rhymes, lockets, lottery 
tickets, and the like. As you pass from the 
contemplation of these things — a contemplation 
not without its touch of pathos — you peep into 
the church, mentally filling the empty benches 
in the organ loft with the singing faces and pure 
voices of the childish choristers, and you re- 
member that here Benjamin West painted the 
altar-piece, and here Laurence Sterne preached. 
Once more in Guildford Street, you turn in- 
stinctively towards another thoroughfare, where 
lived a later writer who must often have made 
the pilgrimage you have just accomplished. For 
at No. 13 Great Coram Street was the home of 
William Makepeace Thackeray, and from the 
shadow of the Foundling, in July, 1840, he sent 



54 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

forth his ' Paris Sketch Book.' When, seven 
years later, he was writing his greatest novel, 
Captain Coram's Charity still lingered in his 
memory. It is on the wall of its church that 
old Mr. Osborne, of ' Vanity Fair' and Russell 
Square, erects his pompous tablet to his dead 
son : it is in the same building that, sitting ' in 
a place whence she could see the head of the 
boy under his father's tombstone, 1 poor Emmy 
feasts her hungry maternal eyes on unconscious 
little Georgy. 



'THE FEMALE QUIXOTE. 1 

/^\NE evening in the spring of the year 175 1, 
^-^ the famous St. Dunstan, or Devil Tavern, 
by Temple Bar, — over whose Apollo Chamber 
you might still read the rhymed 4 Welcome ' 
of Ben Jonson, whence Steele had scrawled 
hasty excuses to 4 Prue ' in Bury Street, and 
where Garth and Swift and Addison had often 
dined together, — was the scene of a remark- 
able literary celebration. A young married 
lady, not then so well-known as she afterwards 
became, had written a novel called the ' Life of 
Harriot Stuart,' which was either just published 
or upon the point of issuing from the press. 
It was her first effort in fiction ; and, probably 
through William Strahan the printer, one of 
whose employes she married, she had sought 
and obtained the acquaintance of Samuel John- 
son. The great man thought very highly of her 
abilities : so much so, that he proposed to his 
colleagues at the Ivy Lane Club (the prede- 
cessor of the more illustrious Literary Club) to 
commemorate the birth of the book by an ' all- 



56 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

night sitting/ Pompous Mr. Hawkins, who 
tells the story, says that the guests, to the 
number of near twenty, including Mrs. Lenox 
(for that was the lady's name), her husband, 
and a female acquaintance, assembled at the 
Devil at about eight o'clock in the evening. 
The supper is characterised as ' elegant/ a 
prominent feature in it being a ' magnificent hot 
apple-pye,' which, because, forsooth (the ' for- 
sooth ' is Hawkins's), Mrs. Lenox was also a 
minor poet, her literary foster-father had caused 
to be stuck with bay-leaves. Besides this, 
after invoking the Muses by certain rites of 
his own invention, which should have been 
impressive, but are not described, Johnson 
' encircled her brows ' with a crown of laurel 
specially prepared by himself. These cere- 
monies completed, the company began to spend 
the evening ' in pleasant conversation, and 
harmless mirth, intermingled at different periods 
with the refreshments of coffee and tea.' But 
there must have been stronger potations as well, 
since the narrator, Hawkins, who had a ' raging 
tooth,' and is therefore excusably inexplicit, 
speaks of the desertion by some of those pres- 
ent of ' the colours of Bacchus ; ' and he ex- 
pressly mentions the fact that Johnson, whose 
face, at five o'clock, ' shone with meridian 



* The Female Quixote.' 57 

splendour,' had confined himself exclusively to 
lemonade. By daybreak, the ' harmless mirth' 
was beginning to be intermingled with slumber, 
from which those who succumbed were only 
rallied with difficulty by a fresh relay of coffee. 
At length, when St. Dunstan's Clock was near- 
ing eight, after waiting two hours for an atten- 
dant sufficiently wakeful to compile the bill, the 
company dispersed. Their symposium had been 
Platonic in its innocence ; but to Hawkins, de- 
moralised by toothache, and sanctimonious by tem- 
perament, their issue into the morning light of 
Fleet Street had all the aspect, and something 
of the remorse, of a tardily-terminated debauch. 
Before he could mentally disinfect himself, he 
was obliged to take a turn or two in the Temple, 
and breakfast respectably at a coffee-house. 

Although she is now forgotten, Charlotte 
Lenox, the heroine of these Johnsonian * high 
jinks,' was once what Browning would have 
termed ' a person of importance in her day.' 
Her father, Colonel James Ramsay, was Lieu- 
tenant-Governor of New York. When his 
daughter was about fifteen, he sent her to 
England, consigning her to the charge of a 
relative in this country, who, by the time she 
reached it, was either dead or mad. Then 
Colonel Ramsay himself departed this life, and 



58 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

she was left without a protector. Lady Rock- 
ingham took her up, receiving her into her 
household ; but an obscure love-affair put an 
end to their connection ; and she subsequently 
found a fresh patroness in the Duchess of 
Newcastle. She must also have tried the stage, 
since Walpole speaks of her as a ' deplorable 
actress.' Her sheet anchor, however, was 
literature. In 1747 Paterson published a thin 
volume of her poems, dedicated to ' the Lady 
Issabella [sic] Finch,' — a volume in which she 
certainly ' touched the tender stops of various 
quills,' since it recalls most of the singers who 
were popular in her time. There are odes 
in imitation of Sappho (with one * p ') ; there 
is a pastoral after the manner of Mr. Pope ; 
there is ' Envy, a Satire ; ' there is a versification 
of one of Mr. Addison's ' Spectators.' To this 
maiden effort, a few years later, followed the 
novel above-mentioned, which is supposed to 
have been more or less autobiographical ; then 
came another novel, ' The Female Quixote ; ' 
then 4 Shakespeare Illustrated ; ' then a trans- 
lation of Sully's ' Memoirs ; ' and then again 
more novels, plays, and translations. Mrs. 
Lenox lived into the present century, supported 
at the last partly from the Literary Fund, and 
partly by the Right Hon. George Rose, who 



' The Female Quixote' 59 

befriended her in her latter days, and ultimately, 
when she died, old and very poor, in Dean's 
Yard, Westminster, paid the expenses of her 
burial. She is said — by Mr. Croker, of course 
— to have been ( plain in her person. 1 If 
this were so, she must have been considerably 
flattered in the portrait by Reynolds which 
Bartolozzi engraved for Harding's ' Shake- 
speare.' It is also stated, on the authority of 
Mrs. Thrale, that, although her books were 
admired, she herself was disliked. As regards 
her own sex, this may have been true ; but it 
is dead against the evidence as regards the men. 
Johnson, for example, openly preferred her be- 
fore Mrs. Carter, Miss Hannah More, and 
Miss Burney ; and he never, to judge by the 
references in BoswelFs ' Life/ wavered in his 
allegiance. He wrote the Dedications to ' The 
Female Quixote ' and ' Shakespeare Illus- 
trated ; ' he helped her materially (as did also 
Lord Orrery) in her version of Pere Brumoy's 
1 Theatre des Grecs ; ' he quoted her in the 
4 Dictionary ; ' he drew up, as late as 1775, the 
1 Proposals ' for a complete edition of her works, 
and he reviewed her repeatedly. What is more, 
he introduced her to Richardson, by whom, up- 
on the ground of her gifts and her misfortunes 
(' She has genius, and she has been unhappy/ 



60 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

said the sentimental little man), she was at once 
admitted to the inner circle of the devoted 
listeners at Parson's-Green. Another of her 
admirers was Fielding, who, in his last book, 
the ' Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,' calls her 
* the inimitable and shamefully distress'd author 
of the Female Quixote. 1 Finally, Goldsmith 
wrote the epilogue to the unsuccessful comedy 
of 'The Sister/ which she based in 1769 upon 
her novel of ' Henrietta,' — an act which is the 
more creditable on his part because the play 
belonged to the ranks of that genteel comedy 
which he detested. A woman who could thus 
enlist the suffrage and secure the service of the 
four greatest writers of her day must have pos- 
sessed exceptional powers of attraction, either 
mental or physical ; and this of itself is almost 
sufficient to account for the lack of a corre- 
sponding enthusiasm in her own sex. 

How she obtained her education, the scanty 
records of her life do not disclose. But it is 
clear that she had considerable attainments ; 
and she obviously added to them a faculty for 
ingenious flattery, which, after the fashion of 
that day, she exhibited in her books. In her best 
effort, ' The Female Quixote,' there is a hand- 
some reference to that ' admirable Writer/ Mr. 
Richardson ; and Johnson is styled ' the greatest 



' The Female Quixote.' 61 

Genius in the present Age.' ' Rail,' she makes 
one of her characters say elsewhere, and pain- 
fully d-propos de boltes, — ' Rail with premedi- 
tated Malice at the " Rambler ; " and, for the 
want of Faults, turn even its inimitable Beauties 
into Ridicule : The Language, because it reaches 
to Perfection, may be called stiff, laboured, and 
pedantic ; the Criticisms, when they let in more 
Light than your weak Judgment can bear, super- 
ficial and ostentatious Glitter ; and because 
those Papers contain the finest System of 
Ethics yet extant, damn the queer Fellow, for 
over-propping Virtue ; ' — in all of which, it is 
to be feared, the bigots of this iron time will 
see nothing but the rankest log-rolling. Yet it 
was not to Mrs. Lenox that Johnson said, 
1 Madam, consider what your praise is worth. 1 
On the contrary, if Dr. Birkbeck Hill conjec- 
tures rightly, he wrote a not unfavourable little 
notice of the book in the ' Gentleman's Maga- 
zine ' for March, 1752, — a notice which, if it 
does no more, at least compactly summarises the 
scheme of the story. ' Arabella,' it says (the full 
title is ' The Female Quixote ; or, the Adventures 
of Arabella' ), * is the daughter of a statesman, 
born after his retirement in disgrace, and edu- 
cated in solitude, at his castle, in a remote pro- 
vince. The romances which she found in the 



62 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

library after her mother's death, were almost the 
only books she had read ; from these therefore 
she derived her ideas of life ; she believed the 
business of the world to be love, every incident 
to be the beginning of an adventure, and every 
stranger a knight in disguise. The solemn man- 
ner in which she treats the most common and 
trivial occurrences, the romantic expectations 
she forms, and the absurdities which she com- 
mits herself, and produces in others, afford a 
most entertaining series of circumstances and 
events.' And then he goes on to quote, as 
coming from one equally ' emulous of Cer- 
vantes, and jealous of a rival/ the opinion which 
Mr. Fielding had expressed a few days earlier, 
in his 'Covent Garden Journal/ — an opinion 
which, if, as Johnson asserts, he had at this 
time no knowledge of the author of the book, 
does even more credit to his generosity than to 
his critical judgment. For the author of ; Tom 
Jones' not only devotes rather more than two 
handsome columns to ' The Female Quixote ; ' 
but, professing to give his report of it ' with no 
less Sincerity than Candour,' gravely proceeds to 
show in what it falls short of, in what it equals, 
and in what it excels (!) the master-piece of 
which it is a professed imitation. According to 
him, the advantage of Mrs. Lenox in the last 



' The Female Quixote' 63 

respect (for the others may be neglected) lies in 
the fact that it is more probable that the reading 
of romances would turn the head of a young 
lady than the head of an old gentleman ; that 
the character of Arabella is more endearing 
than that of Don Quixote ; that her situation 
is more interesting ; and that the incidents of 
her story, as well as the story itself, are less 
• extravagant and incredible ' than those of the 
immortal hero of Cervantes. Finally, he sums 
up with the words which Johnson afterwards 
reproduced, in part, in the ' Gentleman's Maga- 
zine : ' ' I do very earnestly recommend it, as a 
most extraordinary and most excellent Perform- 
ance. It is indeed a Work of true Humour, 
and cannot fail of giving a rational, as well as 
very pleasing Amusement to a sensible Reader, 
who will at once be instructed and very highly 
diverted. Some Faults perhaps there may be, 
but I shall leave the unpleasing Task of pointing 
them out to those who will have more Pleasure 
in the Office. This Caution, however, I think 
proper to premise, that no Persons presume to 
find many [He is speaking in his assumed char- 
acter of Censor of Great Britain]. For if they 
do, I promise them the Critic and not the 
Author will be to blame/ 
Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. In 



64 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

spite of the verdict of Johnson and Fielding, — 
that is to say, in spite of the verdict of the 
Macaulay and Thackeray of the Eighteenth 
Century, — the Critic, it is to be feared, must 
be blamed to-day. Were Fielding alone, one 
might discount his opinion by assuming that he 
would naturally welcome a work of art which 
was on his side rather than on that of Richard- 
son ; but this would not account for the equally 
favourable opinion of Johnson. 1 Nor could it 
be laid entirely to the novelty of the attempt, for 
1 Tom Jones ' and ' Clarissa ' and ' Peregrine 
Pickle, 1 masterpieces all, had by this time been 
written, and can still be read, which it is difficult 
to say of ' The Female Quixote ; or, the Ad- 
ventures of Arabella/ Mrs. Lenox's funda- 
mental idea, no doubt, is a good one, although 
the character of the heroine has its feminine 
prototypes in the ' Precieuses Ridicules ' of 
Moliere and the Biddy Tipkin of Steele's * Ten- 
der Husband. 1 It may be conceded, too, that 
some of the manifold complications which arise 

1 Johnson had, if not a taste, at least an appetite, for 
the old-fashioned romances which Mrs. Lenox satirised. 
Once, at Bishop Percy's, he selected ' Felixmarte of 
Hircania' (in folio) for his habitual reading, and he read 
it through religiously. Upon another occasion his choice 
fell upon Burke's favourite, ' Palmerin of England.' 



' The Female Quixote.' 65 

from her bringing every incident of her career 
to the touchstone of the high-falutin' romances 
of the Sieur de la Calprenede, and that ' grave 
and virtuous virgin,' Madeleine de Scudery, are 
diverting enough. The lamentable predicament 
of the lover, Mr. Glanville, who is convicted of 
imperfect application to the pages of ' Cassandra,' 
by his hopeless ignorance of the elementary fact 
that the Orontes and Oroondates of that perform- 
ance are one and the same person ; the case of 
the luckless dipper into Thucydides and Herodo- 
tus at Bath who is confronted, to his utter dis- 
comfiture, with ' History as She is wrote ' in 
' Clelia ' and ' Cleopatra ; ' the persistence of Ara- 
bella in finding princes in gardeners, and rescuers 
in highwaymen — are things not ill-invented. 
But repeated they pall ; and not all the insistence 
upon her natural good sense and her personal 
charms, nor (as compared with such concurrent 
efforts as Mrs. Heywood's ' Betsy Thoughtless ') 
the inoffensive tone of the book itself, can re- 
concile us to a heroine who is unable to pass 
the sugar-tongs without a reference to Parisatis, 
Princess of Persia, or Cleobuline, Princess of 
Corinth ; — who holds with the illustrious Man- 
dana that, even after ten years of the most 
faithful services and concealed torments, it is 
still presumptuous for a monarch to aspire to 

5 



66 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

her hand ; — and who, upon the slightest provo- 
cation, plunges into tirades of this sort : ' Had 
you persevered in your Affection, and continued 
your Pursuit of that Fair-one, you would, per- 
haps, ere this, have found her sleeping under 
the Shade of a Tree in some lone Forest, 
as Philodaspes did his admirable Delia, or 
disguised in a Slave's Habit, as Ariobarsanes 
saw his Divine Olympia ; or bound haply in a 
Chariot, and have had the Glory of freeing her, 
as Ambriomer did the beauteous Agione ; or in 
a Ship in the Hands of Pirates, like the incom- 
parable Eli\a ; or ' — at which point she is 
fortunately interrupted. In another place she 
fancies her uncle is in love with her, and there- 
upon, ' wiping some Tears from her fine Eyes,' 
apostrophises that elderly and astounded rela- 
tive in this wise — ' Go then, unfortunate and 
lamented Uncle ; go, and endeavour by Rea- 
son and Absence to recover thy Repose ; and be 
assured, whenever you can convince me you 
have triumphed over these Sentiments which 
now cause both our Unhappiness, you shall have 
no Cause to complain of my Conduct towards 
you.' There is an air of unreality about all this 
which, one would think, should have impeded 
its popularity in its own day. In the Spain of 
Don Quixote it is conceivable ; it is intolerable 



' The Female Quixote.' 67 

in the England of Arabella. But there are other 
reasons which help to account for the oblivion 
into which the book has fallen. One is, that by 
neglecting to preserve the atmosphere of the 
age in which it was written, it has missed an 
element of vitality which is retained even by 
such fugitive efforts as Coventry's ' Pompey the 
Little.' - 1 Indeed, beyond the above-quoted ref- 
erences to Johnson and Richardson, and an 
obscure allusion to the beautiful Miss Gunnings 
who, at this date, divided the Talk of the Town 
with the Earthquake, there is scarcely any 
light thrown upon contemporary life and man- 
ners throughout the whole of Arabella's history. 
Another, and a graver objection (as one of her 
critics, whose own admirable 'Amelia' had been 
but recently published, should have known better 
than any one) is that, in spite of the humour of 
some of the situations, the characters of the 
book are colourless and mechanical. Fielding's 
Captain Booth and his wife, Mrs. Bennet and 
Serjeant Atkinson, Dr. Harrison and Colonel 
Bath, are breathing and moving human beings : 
the Glanvilles and Sir Charleses and Sir Georges 
of Mrs. Charlotte Lenox are little more than 
shrill-voiced and wire-jointed ' High-Life ' 
puppets. 

1 This, like * Betsy Thoughtless,' belongs to 1751. 



FIELDING'S 'VOYAGE TO LISBON.' 

1VJOT far from where these lines are written, 
**^ on the right-hand side of the road from 
Acton to Ealing, stands a house called Ford- 
hook. Shut in by walls, and jealously guarded 
by surrounding trees, it offers itself but furtively 
to the incurious passer-by. Nevertheless, it 
has traditions which might well give him pause. 
Even in this century, it enjoyed the distinction 
of belonging to Lady Byron, the poet's wife ; 
and in its existing drawing-room, ' Ada, sole 
daughter of my house and heart,' was married 
to William, Earl of Lovelace. But an earlier 
and graver memory than this lingers about the 
spot. More than one hundred and thirty-eight 
years ago, on a certain Wednesday in June, the 
cottage which formerly occupied the site was 
the scene of one of the saddest leave-takings in 
literature. On this particular day had gathered 
about its door a little group of sympathetic 
friends and relatives, who were evidently assem- 
bled to bid sorrowful good-bye to some one, 



Fielding's ' Voyage to Lisbon.' 69 

for whom, as the clock was striking twelve, a 
coach had just drawn up. Presently a tall man, 
terribly broken and emaciated, but still wearing 
the marks of dignity and kindliness on his once 
handsome face, made his appearance, and was 
assisted, with some difficulty (for he had lost 
the use of his limbs), into the vehicle. An 
elderly, homely-looking woman, and a slim girl 
of seventeen or eighteen, took their seats beside 
him without delay ; and, amid the mingled tears 
and good wishes of the spectators, the coach 
drove off swiftly in the direction of London. 
The sick man was Henry Fielding, the famous 
novelist ; his companions, his second wife and 
his eldest daughter. He was dying of a com- 
plication of diseases ; and, like Peterborough 
and Doddridge before him, was setting out in 
the forlorn hope of finding life and health at 
Lisbon. Since Scott quoted them in 1821, the 
words in which his journal describes his de- 
parture have been classic : 

1 Wednesday, June 26, 1754. — On this day, 
the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld 
arose, and found me awake at my house at 
Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in 
my own opinion, last to behold and take leave 
of some of those creatures on whom I doated 
with a mother-like fondness, guided by nature 



yo Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

and passion, and uncured and unhardened by 
all the doctrine of that philosophical school 
where I had learnt to bear pains and to despise 
death. 

' In this situation, as I could not conquer 
nature, I submitted entirely to her, and she 
made as great a fool of me as she had ever done 
of any woman whatsoever : under pretence of 
giving me leave to enjoy, she drew me in to 
suffer the company of my little ones, during 
eight hours ; and I doubt not whether, in 
that time, I did not undergo more than in all 
my distemper.' 

Of Fielding's life, it may be said truly, that 
nothing in it became him like the leaving it. 
At the moment of his starting for Lisbon, 
his case, as is clear from the above quotation, 
was already regarded by himself as desperate. 
To ' a lingering imperfect gout ' had succeeded 
1 a deep jaundice ; ' and to jaundice, asthma and 
dropsy. He was past the power of the Duke 
of Portland's powder ; past the famous tar- 
water of the good Bishop Berkeley. Had he 
acknowledged his danger earlier, his life might 
have been prolonged, though, in all probability, 
but for brief space. His health had for some 
time been breaking ; he was worn out by his 
harassing vocation as a Middlesex Magistrate ; 



Fielding's 'Voyage to Lisbon.' 71 

and he feared that, in the event of his death, 
his family must starve. This last consideration 
it was, that tempted him to defer his retirement 
to the country in order to break up a notorious 
gang of street-robbers, and so earn (as he 
fondly hoped) some government provision for 
those helpless ones whom he must leave behind 
him. He succeeded in his task, although he 
failed of his reward ; and what was worse, as 
regards his health, much irrecoverable oppor- 
tunity had been lost. By the time that his 
labours were at an end, he was a doomed man. 
The Bath waters could effect nothing in the 
advanced stage of his malady ; and, after a short 
sojourn at his ' little house ' at Ealing, he took 
his passage in the ' Queen of Portugal,' Richard 
Veal, master, for Lisbon. Of this voyage he 
has left his own account ; and the posthumous 
volume thus produced is a curiosity of literature. 
It is one of the most touching records in the lan- 
guage of fortitude under trial ; and it is not 
surprising to learn, as we do from Hazlitt, that 
it was the favourite book of another much- 
enduring mortal, the gentle and uncomplaining 
* Elia. 1 

In these days of steam power, and floating 
palaces, and luxurious sick-room appliances, it 
is not easy to realize the intolerable tedium and 



72 Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 

discomfort, especially to an invalid, of a passage 
in a second-rate sailing-ship in the middle of the 
last century. When, after a rapid but fatiguing 
two hours 1 drive, Fielding reached Redriff 
(Rotherhithe), he had to undergo a further 
penance. The ' Queen of Portugal ' lay in 
mid-stream, a circumstance which necessitated 
his being carried perilously across slippery 
ground, transferred to a wherry, and finally 
hoisted over the ship's side in a chair. Nor 
were his troubles by any means at an end when 
he found himself securely deposited in the cabin. 
The voyage, already more than once deferred, 
was again postponed. First, the vessel could 
not be cleared at the Custom House until 
Thursday, because Wednesday was a holiday 
(Proclamation Day) ; then the skipper himself 
announced that he should not weigh anchor 
before Saturday. Meanwhile, from his unusual 
exertions and other causes, Fielding's main 
malady had gained so considerably that he was 
obliged to summon Dr. William Hunter from 
Covent Garden to tap him — an operation which 
he had already more than once undergone with 
considerable relief. On Sunday the vessel 
dropped down to Gravesend, reaching the 
Nore on July I. Then, for a week, they were 
becalmed in the Downs, making Ryde just in 



Fielding's ' Voyage to Lisbon.' 73 

time to lie safely on the Motherbank during a 
violent storm. Before the ship left Ryde, the 
23d of July had arrived; and it was not until 
the second week in August that she sailed up 
the Tagus, having taken seven weeks to per- 
form a journey which then, at most, occupied 
three, and is now generally accomplished in 
about four days. 

If the ' Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon ' were 
no more than the chronicle of the facts thus 
summarized — nay, if it were no more than 
what Walpole flippantly calls the ' account how 
his [Fielding's] dropsy was treated and teased 
by an innkeeper's wife in the Isle of Wight,' it 
would require and deserve but little considera- 
tion. That it is a literary masterpiece is not 
pretended ; nor, in the circumstances of its 
composition, could a masterpiece be looked for 
— even from a master. But it is interesting 
not so much by the events which it narrates as 
by the indirect light which it throws upon its 
writer's character, upon his manliness, his pa- 
tience, and that inextinguishable cheerfulness 
which, he says in the ' Proposal for the Poor,' 
1 was always natural to me.' His sufferings 
must have been considerable (he had to be 
tapped again before the voyage ended) ; and 
yet, with the exception of some not resentful 



74 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

comment upon the inhumanity of certain water- 
men and sailors who had jeered at his ghastly 
appearance, no word of complaint as to his own 
condition is allowed to escape him. On the 
other hand, his solicitude for his fellow-travel- 
lers is unmistakable. One of the most touching 
pages in the little volume relates how, when 
his wife, worn out with toothache, lay sleeping 
lightly in the stateroom, he and the skipper, 
who was deaf, sat speechless over a ' small 
bowl of punch ' in the adjoining cabin rather 
than run the risk of waking her by a sound. 
1 My dear wife and child,' he says, speaking of 
a storm in the Channel, ' must pardon me, if 
what I did not conceive to be any great evil 
to myself, I was not much terrified with the 
thoughts of happening to them : in truth, I 
have often thought they are both too good, and 
too gentle, to be trusted to the power of any 
man I know, to whom they could possibly be 
so trusted. 1 In another place he relates,- quite 
in his best manner, how he rebuked a certain 
churlish Custom-house officer for his want of 
courtesy to Mrs. Fielding. At times one for- 
gets that it is a dying man who is writing, so 
invincible is that appetite for enjoyment which 
made Lady Mary say he ought to have been 
immortal. Not long after they reached Ryde 



Fielding's 'Voyage to Lisbon.' 75 

he wrote to his half-brother and successor John 
(afterwards Sir John) Fielding : ' I beg that on 
the Day you receive this Mrs. Daniel [his 
mother-in-law] may know that we are just risen 
from Breakfast in Health and Spirits [the italics 
are ours] this twelfth Instant at 9 in the morn- 
ing.' At Ryde they were shamefully entreated by 
the most sharp-faced and tyrannical of landladies, 
in whose incommodious hostelry they sought 
temporary refuge ; and yet it is at Ryde that 
he chronicles ' the best, the pleasantest, and the 
merriest meal [in a barn], with more appetite, 
more real, solid luxury, and more festivity, than 
was ever seen in an entertainment at White's.' 
And almost the last lines of the ' Journal ' recall 
a good supper in a Lisbon coffee-house for 
which they ' were as well charged, as if the bill 
had been made on the Bath road, between 
Newbury and London.' 

But the pleasures of the table play a subor- 
dinate part in the sick man's diary, and often 
only prompt a larger subject, as when the John 
Dory which regales them at Torbay introduces 
a disquisition on the improvement of the London 
fish supply. As might be anticipated, some of 
his best passages deal with the humanity about 
him. With characteristic reticence, he says 
little of his own companions, but his pen strays 



j6 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

easily into graphic sketches of the little world of 
the ' Queen of Portugal.' The ill-conditioned 
Custom-house officer, already mentioned ; the 
military fop who comes to visit the captain at 
Spithead ; the sordid and shrewish Ryde land- 
lady with her chuckle-headed nonentity of a 
husband — are all touched by a hand which, if 
tremulous, betrays no diminution of its cunning. 
Of all the portraits, however, that of the skipper 
is the best. 1 The rough, illiterate, septuagena- 
rian sea-captain, ' full of strange oaths ' and 
superstitions, despotic, irascible and good- 
natured, awkwardly gallanting the ladies in all 
the splendours of a red coat, cockade and sword, 
and heart-broken, privateer though he had been, 
when his favourite kitten is smothered by a 
feather-bed, has all the elements of a finished 
individuality. It is with respect to him that 

1 The picture, it should be added, was not, at first 
presented in its racy entirety. When, in February, 1755, 
the 'Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon ' was given to the 
world for the benefit of Fielding's widow and children, 
although the ' Dedication to the Public ' affirmed the 
book to be ' as it came from the hands of the author,' 
many of the franker touches which go to complete the 
full-length of Captain Richard Veal, as well as sundry 
other particulars, were withheld. This question is fully 
discussed in the Introduction to the limited edition of 
the 'Journal,' published in 1892 by the Chiswick Press. 



Fielding s 'Voyage to Lisbon.' 77 

occurs almost the only really dramatic incident 
of the voyage. A violent dispute having arisen 
about the exclusive right of the passengers to 
the cabin, Fielding resolved, not without mis- 
givings, to quit the ship, ordering a hoy for that 
purpose, and taking care, as became a magis- 
trate, to threaten Captain Yeal with what that 
worthy feared more than rock or quicksand, the 
terrors of retributory legal proceedings. The 
rest may be told in the journalist's own words : 
' The most distant sound of law thus frightened 
a man, who had often, I am convinced, heard 
numbers of cannon roar round him with intrepi- 
dity. Nor did he sooner see the hoy approach- 
ing the vessel, than he ran down again into the 
cabin, and, his rage being perfectly subsided, he 
tumbled on his knees, and a little too abjectly 
implored for mercy. 

' I did not suffer a brave man and an old man, 
to remain a moment in this posture ; but I im- 
mediately forgave him.' Most of those who 
have related this anecdote end discreetly at this 
point. Fielding, however, is too honest to allow 
us to place his forbearance entirely to the credit 
of his magnanimity. ' And here, that I may not 
be thought the sly trumpeter of my own praises, 
I do utterly disclaim all praise on the occasion. 
Neither did the greatness of my mind dictate, 



78 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

nor the force of my Christianity exact this for- 
giveness. To speak truth, I forgave him from a 
motive which would make men much more for- 
giving, if they were much wiser than they are ; 
because it was convenient for me so to do.' 

With the arrival of the ' Queen of Portugal' 
at Lisbon the ' Journal ' ends, and no further 
particulars of its writer are forthcoming. Two 
months later he died in the Portuguese capital, 
and was buried among the cypresses of the 
beautiful English cemetery. Luget Britannia 
gremio non dari Fovere natum — is inscribed 
upon his tomb. 



HANWAY'S TRAVELS. 

/^VNE hot day in Holborn, — one of those 
^^ very hot days when, as Mr. Andrew Lang 
or M. Octave Uzanne has said, the brown 
backs buckle in the fourpenny boxes, and you 
might poach an egg on the cover of a quarto, — 
the incorrigible bookhunter who pens these 
pages purchased two octavo volumes of ' Beauties 
of the Spectators, Tatlers and Guardians, Con- 
nected and Digested under Alphabetical Heads.' 
That their contents were their main attraction 
would be too much to say. For the literary 
* Beauties ' of one age, like those other 

' Beauties reckoned 
So killing — under George the Second/ 

are not always the literary i Beauties ' of another. 
Where the selector of to-day would put Sir 
Roger de Coverley and Will Wimble, the Ever- 
lasting Club, or the Exercise of the Fan, the 
judicious gentlemen in rusty wigs and inked 
ruffles who did the ' connecting ' and ' digest- 
ing' department for Messrs. Tonson in the 



8o Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Strand, put passages on Detraction, Astronomy, 
Chearfulness (with an ' a ' ), Bankruptcy, Self- 
Denial, Celibacy, and the Bills of Mortality. 
They must have done a certain violence to their 
critical convictions by including, in forlorn isola- 
tion, such flights of imagination as the ' Inkle 
and Yarico ' of Mr. Steele and the ' Hilpah and 
Shalum' of Mr. Addison. The interest of this 
particular copy is, however, peculiar to itself. 
It is bound neatly in full mottled calf, with 
stamped gold roses at the corners of the covers ; 
and at the points of a star in the centre are 
printed the letters G, E, G, C. An autograph 
inscription in the first volume explains this 
mystery. They are the initials of the ' Twin 
Sisters Miss Elizabeth, & Miss Caroline Grigg,' 
to whom are addressed the votive couplets that 
follow : — 

* Freedom & Virtue, Twin born from Heavn came. 
And like two Sisters fair, are both the same. 
On Thee Elizabeth may Virtue smile ! 
And Thou, sweet Caroline, Life's cares beguile 
May Gracious Providence protect & guide, 
That Days & Years in peace may slide ; 
And bring You Bliss, in Parents love, 
Till You shall reach the bliss above.' 

After this comes — * Thus prays Your very true 
friend & affectionate Servant J Hanway,' — a 



Hanways's Travels. 81 

signature which proves that one may be a praise- 
worthy Philanthropist and a copious Pam- 
phleteer and yet write no better verse than the 
Bellman. For without consulting the records 
at the Marine Society in Bishopsgate Street, 
there is little doubt that the writer of these lines 
was the once well-known Jonas Hanway of the 
Ragged Schools, the Magdalen Hospital, and 
half a hundred other benevolent undertakings. 
Indeed the circumstance that the book is ad- 
dressed to two ladies is, of itself, almost proof 
of this, since, either from bachelor caution, or 
from some other obscure cause, Hanway always 
attaches a Dingley to his Stella. His ' Journey 
from Portsmouth to Kingston ' is addressed to 
two ladies ; so also is his famous ; Essay on 
Tea.' But there is stronger confirmation still. 
He was in the habit of giving away copies of 
this very book — in fact of this very edition — 
as presents to his friends and proUgis. Not 
long ago, in a second-hand bookseller's cata- 
logue, was advertised another pair of the same 
volumes, in ' old English red morocco, elabo- 
rately tooled,' which had been given by Hanway 
to his e young friend Master John Thomson.' 
It was dated from Red Lion Square in 1772. 
the same year in which his verses to the Demoi- 
selles Grigg were written. Master Thomson's 

6 



82 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

initials were also impressed upon the sides of 
this copy ; and although the Muses had not been 
invoked in his behalf, the book contained a 
holograph letter of nine pages of useful advice, 
by the aid of which, coupled with the ' Beauties,' 
he was to learn ■ to attain the treasures of health, 
wealth, peace, and happiness/ But from the 
excellent condition of the volumes in both in- 
stances, it must be inferred that neither the twin 
sisters nor Mr. Hanway's " young friend ' acted 
upon Johnson's precept and gave their days 
and nights to the periods of Addison. 

Of Hanway himself, Johnson said, in his 
memorable way, ' that he acquired some repu- 
tation by travelling abroad, but lost it all by 
travelling at home. 1 His ' Historical Account of 
the British Trade on the Caspian Sea ' (generally 
called ' Travels in Persia'), 1753, 4 vols., quarto, 
did indeed once enjoy a considerable reputation, 
and his adventures were adventurous enough. 
Beginning life as a Lisbon merchant, he subse- 
quently accepted a partnership in a St. Peters- 
burgh house. At this date the Russo-Persian 
trade had recently been established by Captain 
John Elton, who afterwards, to the disgust of 
the St. Petersburgh factors, took service under 
Nadir Shah. Hanway accompanied a caravan 
of woollen goods to Persia ; and here began his 



Hanway's Travels. 83 

experiences. He found Astrabad in rebellion, 
and the caravan was plundered. Thereupon, 
after many privations and narrow escapes, he 
made his way to Nadir Shah, who ordered 
restitution of the goods, — a restitution which 
was more easy to order than to execute, although 
something was restored. But the traveller's 
troubles were by no means at an end. In the 
Caspian, on the return voyage, his ship was at- 
tacked by the Ogurtjoy pirates, and he himself 
afterwards fell seriouslv ill. To this succeeded, 
in consequence of the presence of plague at 
Cashan, the amenities of a long quarantine on 
an island in the Volga, in the final stage of 
which the unhappy travellers * were required to 
strip themselves entirely naked in the open air 
[this was in a Russian October], and go through 
the unpleasant ceremony of having each a large 
pail of warm water thrown over them, before 
they were permitted to depart. 1 When Hanway 
at last reached Moscow, he found that the op- 
portune death of a relative had placed him in 
possession ' of pecuniary advantages, much ex- 
ceeding any he could expect from his engage- 
ment in Caspian affairs.' He nevertheless stayed 
five years and a half more at St. Petersburgh ; 
and then, returning to England, took up his 
abode in London, where he proceeded to pre- 



84 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

pare his travels for the press. Being laudably 
unwilling that any publisher should run the risk 
of losing money by him, the first edition was 
printed at his own expense ; but the book proved 
a great success, passing speedily into many 
libraries (into Gray's among others), and An- 
drew Millar ultimately purchased the copyright. 
The remainder of Han way's life was spent in 
philanthropy and pamphleteering. He helped 
Sir John Fielding and others to set on foot 
the still existent Marine Society for training 
boys for the sea ; he helped to remodel ' Cap- 
tain Coram's Charity,' of which he was a Gov- 
ernor ; he founded the Magdalen Hospital ; 
he advocated the interests of Sunday-Schools 
and Ragged Schools, of chimney-sweeps and 
the infant poor. Not the least important of 
his services to the community was his vindica- 
tion, in the teeth of the chairmen and hackney 
coachmen, of the use, by men, of the umbrella, 
hitherto confined to the weaker sex. 1 As a 
pamphleteer he was unwearied, and the mere 
titles of his efforts in this way occupy four 

1 ' Good housewives all the winter's rage despise, 
Defended by the riding-hood's disguise : 
Or underneath th' umbrella's oily shed, 
Safe thro' the wet, on clinking pattens tread.' 

Gay's Trivia, 1716, i. 209-212. 



Hanway's Travels. 85 

columns of Messrs. Stephen and Lee's great 
dictionary. He wrote on the Naturalization of 
the Jews ; he wrote on Vails-Giving, on the 
American War, on Pure Bread, on Solitary 
Confinement ; he wrote ' Earnest Advice ' and 
' Moral Reflections ' to Everybody on Every- 
thing. To misuse Ben Jonson's words of 
Shakespeare, ' He flowed with that facility that 
sometimes it was necessary he should be 
stopped. 1 One entire pamphlet on bread was 
dictated in the space of a forenoon, says his 
secretary and biographer Pugh. When it is 
further explained that it consisted of two hun- 
dred law sheets, or ninety octavo pages, it is ob- 
vious that the excellent author's powers as a 
pamphleteer must have been preternatural. 
But it is hardly surprising to find even his 
admirer admitting that his ideas were not well 
arranged, and that his style was undeniably 
diffuse. 

This latter quality is aptly illustrated by a 
volume which lies before us, being in fact the 
identical record of those travels in England by 
which Johnson asserted that Mr. Hanway had 
lost the celebrity he had acquired by his 
' Travels in Persia. 1 The very title of the book 
— a privately printed quarto — is as long as that 
of ' Pamela. 1 It runs thus, — ' A Journal of 



86 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to 
Kingston upon Thames ; through Southamp- 
ton, Wiltshire, etc. With Miscellaneous 
Thoughts, Moral and Religious; in a Series of 
Sixty -four Letters : Addressed to two Ladies of 
the Partie. To which is added. An Essay on 
tea, considered as pernicious to Health, obstruct- 
ing Industry, and impoverishing the Nation : 
With an Account of its Growth, and great Con- 
sumption in these Kingdoms. With several 
political Reflections ; and Thoughts on Public 
Love. In Twenty-five Letters to the same 
Ladies. By a Gentleman of the Partie. London: 
H. Woodfall, 1756. 1 The ' Partie, 1 by the 
way, if we are to trust Wale's emblematic 
frontispiece, must have been limited to the 
writer and these two ladies, discreetly dis- 
guised in the ' Contents ' as ' Mrs. D.' and 
1 Mrs. O.' Why, as remarked by an inge- 
nious ' Monthly Reviewer/ it should be 
necessary to tell ' Mrs. D.' and ' Mrs. OS 
(whom the artist shows us conversing agreeably 
with Mr. Hanway under an awning in a two- 
oared boat) what, having been of the ' Partie,' 
they probably knew quite as well as he did, is 
not explained. But on the other hand, it may 
be contended that he really tells them very little, 
since the ' Moral and Religious ' reflections al- 



Hanway's Travels. 87 

most entirely swallow up the Travels. ' On every 
occurrence/ says the critic quoted, * he expati- 
ates, and indulges in reflection. The appear- 
ance of an inn upon the road suggests ... an 
eulogium on temperance ; the confusion of a 
disappointed Landlady gives rise to a Letter on 
Resentment ; and the view of a company of 
soldiers furnishes out materials for an Essay on 
War.' The company of soldiers was Lord 
George Bentinck's regiment of infantry on their 
march to Essex ; and one sighs to think with 
what a bustle of full-blooded humanity — what 
a ' March to Finchley ' of incident — the author 
of a ' Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon ' would 
have filled the storied page. But Mr. Hanway 
is not the least penitent ; rather is he proud 
of his reticence. He specially expresses his 
gratitude to the hostess ' who gave occasion 
for my thoughts on resentment, a subject far 
more interesting than whether a battle was 
fought at this, or any other place, five hun- 
dred years ago.' (If ' Mrs. D.' and ' Mrs. 
O." were really of this opinion, they must have 
been curiously constituted.) ' Can you bear 
with this medley of both worlds ? ' he asks 
them on another occasion, and it is not easy to 
reply except by saying that there is too much of 
one and too little of the other. To pass Bevis 



88 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Mount with the barest mention of Lord Peter- 
borough ; to come to Amesbury and ' Prior's 
Kitty ' and be fobbed off with ' a pious rhap- 
sody ; ' to stop at Stockbridge for which Steele 
was member when he was expelled from Par- 
liament, only to enter upon fifty pages of 
indiscriminate reflections on Public Love, Self- 
examination, the Vanity of Life, and half a 
dozen other instructive but irrelevant subjects, 
— these things, indeed, are hard to bear, es- 
pecially as they are not recommended by any 
particular distinction of matter or manner. 
4 Tho' his opinions are generally true,' says the 
critic already quoted, ' and his regard for virtue 
seems very sincere, yet these alone are not, at 
this day, sufficient to defend the cause of truth ; 
stile, elegance, and all the allurements of good 
writing, must be called in aid : especially if the 
age be in reality, as it is represented by this 
Author, averse to everything that but seems to 
be serious. 1 ' Novelty of thought,' he says 
again, ' and elegance of expression, are what 
we chiefly require, in treating on topics with 
which the public are already acquainted : but 
the art of placing trite materials in new and 
striking lights, cannot be reckoned among the 
excellencies of this Gentleman ; who generally 
enforces his opinions by arguments rather ob- 



Hanway's Travels. 89 

vious than new, and that convey more con- 
viction than pleasure to the Reader.' 

Why, with the book before us, we should 
borrow from an anonymous writer in the 
' Monthly Review,' requires a word of explana- 
tion. The reviewer was Oliver Goldsmith, 
at this time an unknown scribbler, working as 
'general utility man ' to Mr. Ralph Griffiths the 
bookseller, who owned the magazine. Gold- 
smith devotes most of his notice to the ' Essay 
on Tea,' the scope of which is sufficiently indi- 
cated by its title. But the ' Essay on Tea ' 
also engaged the attention of a better known 
though not greater critic, Samuel Johnson, 
whose ' corruption was raised ' (as the Scotch 
say) by this bulky if not weighty indictment 
of his darling beverage. Johnson's critique 
was in the ' Literary Magazine.' At the out- 
set he makes candid and characteristic profes- 
sion of faith. ' He is,' he says, ' a hardened 
and shameless Tea-drinker, who has for twenty 
years diluted his meals with only the infu- 
sion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle has 
scarcely time to cool, who with Tea amuses 
the evening, with Tea solaces the midnight, and 
with Tea welcomes the morning.'' The argu- 
ments, on either side, are now of little moment, 
though Hanway, as a merchant, is better worth 



go Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

hearing on the commercial aspect of the Tea 
question than on things in general. But the 
review greatly irritated him. An unfortunate 
remark dropped by Johnson about the religious 
education of the children in the Foundling 
stung him into an angry retort in the ' Gazetteer,' 
— a retort to which (according to Boswell) 
Johnson made the only rejoinder he is ever 
known to have offered to anything that was 
written against him. As may be expected, it 
was not a document from which his opponent 
could extract much personal gratification ; but 
it is not otherwise remarkable. 

That the criticism of Johnson and Goldsmith 
was not wholly undeserved must, it is feared, be 
conceded. Even in days less book-burdened, 
and more patient of tedium than our own, to 
string half a dozen pamphlets of platitudes upon 
the slenderest of threads, and call it the ' Journal 
of a Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston- 
upon-Thames, 1 could scarcely have been toler- 
able. Yet Johnson allowed to the author the 
' merit of meaning well.' Hanway's benevo- 
lence was, in truth, unquestioned. His sincerity 
was beyond suspicion, and his services to his 
fellow-creatures were considerable. His mis- 
fortune was that, like many excellent persons, 
his sense of humour was imperfect, and his in- 



Hanways Travels, 91 

firmity of digression chronic. He was, more- 
over, the victim of the common delusion that to 
teach and to preach are interchangeable terms. 
His biographer Pugh, who admits that, with all 
his good qualities, he had a ' certain singularity 
of thought and manners,' gives some curious 
details as to his habits and costume. In order 
to be always ready for polite society, he usu- 
ally appeared in dress clothes, including a large 
French bag (which duly figures in Wale's fron- 
tispiece) and a chapeau bras with a gold button. 
' When it rained, a small parapluie defended his 
face and wig.' His customary garb was a suit 
of rich dark brown, lined with ermine, to which 
he added a small gold-hilted sword. He was ex- 
tremely susceptible to cold, and habitually wore 
three pairs of stockings. He was an active 
pedestrian, although he possessed an equipage 
called a ' solo ' (which we take to be the equiva- 
lent of Sterne's Disoblige ant). Among his other 
characteristics was the embellishment of his 
house in Red Lion Square in such a way as to 
prompt and promote improving conversation in 
those unhappy intermissions of talk which come 
about while the card-tables are being set, and so 
forth. The decorations in the drawing-room 
were not without a certain mildly-moral inge- 
nuity. They consisted of portraits of Adrienne 



92 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Le Couvreur and five other famous beauties, in 
frames united by a carved and gilded ribbon 
inscribed with passages in praise of beauty. 
Above these was placed a statue of Humility ; 
below, a mirror just convex enough to reduce the 
female spectator to the scale of the portraits, 
and round the frame of this was painted, — 

' Wert thou, my daughter, fairest of the seven ; 
Think on the progress of devouring Time, 
And pay thy tribute to Humility/ 

Hanway died in 1786, aged seventy-four. 
His fate was one not unbefitting those whose 
lives are expended in the ungrateful task of ame- 
liorating society. He is buried at Hanwell, and 
he has a bust in Westminster Abbey. 



A GARRET IN GOUGH SQUARE. 

TVTOT very far from 'streaming London's 
•*■ * central roar' — or, in plain words, about 
midway in Fleet Street, on the left-hand side as 
you go toward Ludgate Hill — is a high and 
narrow archway or passage over which is painted 
in dingy letters the words ' Bolt Court. 1 To the 
lover of the ' Great Cham of Literature,' the 
name comes freighted with memories. More 
than a hundred years ago ' the ponderous mass 
of Johnson's form,' to quote a poem by Mrs. 
Barbauld, must often have darkened that con- 
tracted approach, when, in order to greet with 
tea the coming day (' veniente die'), 1 and to 
postpone if possible that ' unseasonable hour at 
which he had habituated himself to expect the 
oblivion of repose,' he rolled across from the 
Temple to Miss Williams's rooms. Where 
the blind lady lodged, no Society of Arts tablet 
now reveals to us ; but as soon as the pilgrim 
has traversed the dark and greasy entrance-way, 

1 ' Te veniente die, te decedente cane&at.' — Georg. 
iv. 466. 



94 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

and finds himself in the little court itself, with 
its disorderly huddle of buildings, and confusion 
of tip-cat playing children, he is in Johnson's 
land, and only a few steps from the actual spot 
on which Johnson's last hours were spent. 
Fronting him, in the farther angle of the enclo- 
sure, is the Stationers 1 Company's School, and 
the Stationers' Company's School stands upon 
the site of No. 8 Bolt Court, formerly Bensley's 
Printing Office, 1 but earlier still the last residence 
of Dr. Johnson, who lived in it from 1776 to 
1784. It was in the back-room of its first floor 
that, on Monday, the 13th December in the 
latter year, at about seven o'clock in the even- 
ing, his black servant Francis Barber and his 
friend Mrs. Desmoulins, who watched in the 
sick-chamber, ' observing that the noise he 
made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, 
and found that he was dead.' 

1 Bensley succeeded Allen the printer, Johnson's land- 
lord. During Bensley's tenancy of the house it was 
twice the scene of disastrous fires, by the second of 
which (in June, 1819) the Doctor's old rooms were entirely 
destroyed. Among other valuables burned at Bensley's 
was the large wood block engraved by Bewick's pupil, 
Luke Clennell, for the diploma of the Highland Society ; 
and the same artist's cuts after Stothard for Rogers's 
' Pleasures of Memory ' of 18 10, were only saved from a 
like fate by being kept in a ' ponderous iron chest.' 



A Garret in Gough Square. 95 

Standing in Bolt Court to-day, before the 
unimposing facade of the school which now oc- 
cupies the spot, it is not easy to reconstruct 
that quiet parting-scene ; nor is it easy to realize 
the old book-burdened upper floors, or the 
lower reception chamber, where, according to 
Sir John Hawkins, were given those ; not in- 
elegant dinners ' of the good Doctor's more 
opulent later years. Least of all is it possible 
to conceive that, somewhere in this pell-mell of 
bricks and mortar, was once a garden which the 
famous Lexicographer took pleasure in water- 
ing ; and where, moreover, grew a vine from 
which, only a few months before he died, he 
gathered * three bunches of grapes. But if 
Bolt Court prove unstimulating, you have only 
to take a few steps to the right, and you arrive, 
somewhat unexpectedly, in a little parallelo- 
gram at the back, known as Gough Square. 
Here, to-day, in the northwest corner, still 
exists the last of those sixteen residences in 
which Johnson lived in London. It is at present 
a place of business ; but the tenants make no 
difficulty about your examination of it, and when 
you inquire for the well-known garret you are 
at once invited to inspect it. The interior of 
the house, of course, is much altered, but there 
is still a huge chain at the front door, which 



g6 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

dates from Johnson's day, and the old oak- 
balustraded staircase remains intact. As you 
climb its narrow stages, you remember that, 
sixty years since, Thomas Carlyle must have 
made that ascent before you ; * and you wonder 
how Johnson, with his bad sight and his rolling 
gait, managed to steer up it at all. The flight 
ends in the garret itself, upon which you emerge 
at present, as in a hay-loft. But it is not in the 
least such a ' sky-parlour 1 as Hogarth assigns to 
his ' Distressed Poet. 1 It occupies the whole 
width and breadth of the building ; it is suffi- 
ciently lighted by three windows in front, and 
two dormers at the sides ; and the pitch of the 
roof is by no means low. Here you are act- 
ually in Johnson's house ; and as you turn to 
look at the stairway you have just quitted, it is 
odds if you do not expect to see the shrivelled 
wig, the seared, blinking face, and the heavy 
shoulders of the Doctor himself rising slowly 
above the aperture with a huge volume under 
his arm. For it was in this very garret in 
Gough Square, within sound of the hammers of 
that famous clock of St. Dunstan's, to which 
Cowper refers in the ' Connoisseur, 1 that the 
great Dictionary was compiled. Here laboured 

1 He visited it in 1831 (Froude's 'Carlyle/ vol. ii. 
ch. x.). 



A Garret in Gougb Square. 97 

Shiels, the amanuensis, and his five com- 
panions, ceaselessly transcribing the passages 
which had been marked for them to copy, and 
probably going ' odd man or plain Newmarket ' 
for beer as soon as ever their employer's back 
was turned ; here, also, at the little fire-place 
in the corner, must often have sat Johnson him- 
self, peering closely (much as Reynolds shows 
him in the portrait of 1778) at the proofs that 
were going to long-suffering Andrew Millar. It 
was in this identical garret that Joseph Warton 
once visited him to pay a subscription ; here 
came Roubillac and Sir Joshua ; and here, when 
the room had grown to be dignified by the title 
of the ' library,' Johnson received Dr. Burney, 
who found in it ' five or six Greek folios, a deal 
writing-desk, and a chair and a half.' The half- 
chair must have been that mentioned by Miss 
Reynolds ; and it is evident that long experi- 
ence or repeated misadventure had made John- 
son both skilful and cautious in manipulating it. 
' A gentleman, 1 she says, ' who frequently visited 
him whilst writing his ' Idlers" [the ' Idler' 
was partly composed in Gough Square in 1758] 
constantly found him at his desk, sitting on a 
chair with three legs ; and on rising from it, he 
remarked that Dr. Johnson never forgot its de- 
fect, but would either hold it in his hand or place 

7 



98 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

it with great composure against some support, 
taking no notice of its imperfection to his 
visitor.' ' It was remarkable in Dr. Johnson, 1 
she goes on, ' that no external circumstances 
ever prompted him to make any apology, or to 
seem even sensible of their existence.' 

In Gough Square Johnson lived from 1749 to 
1759. 'I have this day moved my things,' he 
writes to his step-daughter, Miss Porter, on the 
23rd of March in the latter year, ' and you are 
now to direct to me at Staple Inn.' These ten 
years were among the busiest and most produc- 
tive of his life. No pension had as yet made 
existence easier to him ; no Boswell was at hand 
to seduce him to port and the Mitre ; and the 
Literary Club, as yet unborn, existed only in 
embryo at a beefsteak shop in Ivy Lane. Be- 
sides the 'Idler' and the Dictionary, which 
latter was published in the middle of his sojourn 
at Gough Square, he sent forth from his garret 
1 Irene ' and the ' Vanity of Human Wishes,' the 
' Rambler,' and the essays in Hawkesworth's 
4 Adventurer.' It was here that he drew up 
those proposals for that belated edition of 
Shakespeare of which Churchill said : 

He for Subscribers baits his hook, 

And takes their cash — but where 's the Book? 



A Garret in Gough Square. 99 

and here, early in 1759, he wrote his ' Rasselas.' 
It was in Gough Square, on the 16th of March, 
1756, that he was arrested for £^ 185., and only- 
released by a prompt loan from Samuel Richard- 
son ; it was while living in Gough Square that 
he penned that noble letter to Chesterfield, of 
which Time seems to intensify rather than to 
attenuate the dignity and the independent ac- 
cent. ' Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who 
looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life 
in the water, and, when he has reached ground, 
encumbers him with help ? The notice which 
you have been pleased to take of my labours, had 
it been early, had been kind ; but it has been de- 
layed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it ; 
till I am solitary, and cannot impart it ; till I am 
known, and do not want it. I hope it is no 
very cynical asperity not to confess obligations 
where no benefit has been received, or to be 
unwilling that the Publick should consider me 
as owing that to a Patron, which Providence 
has enabled me to do for myself.' 

' Till I am solitary, and cannot impart it.' 
The same thought recurs in the closing words 
of the preface to his magnum opus, which, little 
more than two months after the date of the 
above letter, appeared in a pair of folio vol- 
umes. ' I have protracted my work till most of 



ioo Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

those whom I wished to please have sunk into 
the grave ; and success and miscarriage are empty 
sounds.' It needs no Boswell to tell us that 
the reference here is to the death, three years 
before, of his wife, — that fantastic 'Tetty,' to 
himself so beautiful, to his friends so unattrac- 
tive, whom he loved so ardently and so faith- 
fully, and whose name, coupled with so many 
' pious breathings,' is so frequently to be found 
in his ' Prayers and Meditations.' 'This is the 
day,' he wrote, thirty years afterwards, ' on 
which, in 1752, dear Tetty died. I have now 
uttered a prayer of repentance and contrition ; 
perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Per- 
haps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me.' 
In her epitaph at Bromley he styles her ' for- 
mosa, culta, ingeniosa, pia." In a recently dis- 
covered letter she is his ' charming Love,' his 
1 most amiable woman in the world,' and (even 
at fifty) his ' dear Girl.' He preserved her 
wedding ring, says Boswell, ' as long as he 
lived, with an affectionate care, in a little round 
wooden box, in the inside of which he pasted 
a slip of paper, thus inscribed by him in fair 
characters, as follows : ' Eheu ! Eli\. Johnson, 
Nupta Jul. 9 1736, Mortua, eheu ! Mart. iy° 
1752.' Her loss was not the only bereavement 
he suffered in Gough Square. Two months be- 



A Garret in Gougb Square. 101 

fore he left it, in 1759, his mother died at Lich- 
field — < one of the few calamities, 1 he had told 
Lucy Porter, 4 on which he thought with terror. 1 
Confined to London by his work, he was not 
able to close her eyes ; but he wrote to her a 
last letter almost too sacred in its wording for 
the profanation of type, and he consecrated an 
'Idler' to her memory. 'The last year, the 
last day, must come/ he says mournfully. ' It 
has come, and is past. The life which made my 
own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of 
death are shut upon my prospects.' To pay his 
mother's modest debts, and to cover the ex- 
penses of her funeral, he penned his sole ap- 
proach to a work of fiction, — the story of 
1 Rasselas.' 

Who now reads Johnson ? If he pleases still, 
'T is most for Dormitive or Sleeping Pill, — 

one might say, in not inappropriate parody of 
Pope. His strong individuality, his intellectual 
authority, his conversational power, must live 
for ever ; but his books I — who, outside the 
fanatics of literature, — who reads them now? 
Macaulay, we are told by Lord Houghton, once 
quoted ' London ' at a dinner-table, but then he 
was talking to Dean Milman ; and Dr. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, in his novel of ' A Mortal 



102 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Antipathy,' refers to the Prince of Abyssinia. 
Browning, says Mrs. Sutherland Orr, qualified 
himself for poetry in his youth by a diligent 
perusal of the Dictionary ; and it may perhaps 
be said of him, in those words of Horace which 
Johnson himself applied to Prior, that * the 
vessel long retained the scent which it first re- 
ceived. 1 But who now, among the supporters 
of the circulating libraries, ever gets out the 
' Rambler,' or ' Irene,' or the ' Vanity of Human 
Wishes ' (beloved of Scott and Byron), or ' Ras- 
selas,' — ' Rasselas,' once more popular than 
the ' Vicar of Wakefield,' 1 — ' Rasselas,' which, 
despite such truisms as ' What cannot be re- 
paired is not to be regretted,' is full of sagacious 
* criticism of life ' 1 The honest answer must be, 
1 Very few.' Yet a day may come when the 
Johnsonese of Johnson's imitators will be for- 
gotten, and people will turn once more to the 
fountain-head to find, with surprise, that it is 
not so polluted with Latinisms after all, and that 
it abounds in passages direct and forcible. ' Of 
all the writings which are models.' says Profes- 
sor Earle, ' models I mean in the highest sense 

1 Of an illustrated edition of the 'Vicar* published at 
the end of 1890. we are credibly informed that 8,000 
copies were sold within a twelvemonth. And where is 
' Rasselas ' now ? 



A Garret in Gough Square. 103 

of the word, models from which the spirit of 
genuine true and wholesome diction is to be 
imbibed (not models of mannerism of which 
the trick or fashion is to be caught), I have no 
hesitation in saying that there is one author 
unapproachably and incomparably the best, and 
that is Samuel Johnson. 1 And this is the ' de- 
liberate conclusion ' of an expert who has given 
almost a lifetime to the comparative study of 
English prose. 



HOGARTH'S SIGISMUNDA. 

'"TOWARDS the close of the last century, the 
regular attendants upon the ministrations 
of the Rev. James Trebeck in the picturesque 
old church at the end of Chiswick Mall, must 
often have witnessed the arrival of a well-known 
member of the congregation. Year after year 
had been wheeled in a Bath chair from her little 
villa under the wing of the Duke of Devon- 
shire's mansion hard by, a stately old lady be- 
tween seventy and eighty years of age, whose 
habitual costume was a silk sacque, a raised 
head-dress, and a black calash. Leaning heavily 
upon her crutched cane, and aided by the arm 
of a portly female relative in similar attire, she 
would make her way slowly and with much 
dignity up the nave, being generally preceded 
by a bent and white-haired man-servant, who, 
after carrying the prayer-books into the pew, 
and carefully closing the door upon his mistress 
and her companion, would himself retire to a 
remoter part of the building. From the fre- 
quenters of the place, the little procession at- 



Hogarth's Sigismunda. 105 

tracted no more notice than any other recog- 
nized ceremonial, of which the intermission 
would alone have been remarkable ; but it sel- 
dom failed to excite the curiosity of those way- 
farers who, under the third George, already 
sought reverently, along the pleasant riverside, 
for that house in Mawson's Buildings where the 
great Mr. Pope wrote part of his ' Iliad,' or for 
the garden of Richard, Earl of Burlington, 
where idle John Gay gorged himself with apri- 
cots and peaches. They would be told that the 
elder lady was the widow of the famous painter, 
William Hogarth, who lay buried under the tea- 
caddy-like tomb in the neighbouring churchyard ; 
that her companion was her cousin, Mary Lewis, 
in whose arms he died ; and that the old ser- 
vant's name was Samuel. For five and twenty 
years Mrs. Hogarth survived her husband, dur- 
ing all of which time she faithfully cherished his 
memory. Those who visited her at her Chis- 
wick home (for she had another in Leicester 
Square) would recall with what tenacity she was 
wont to combat the view that he was a mere 
maker of caricatura, or, at best, ' a writer of 
comedy with the pencil,' as Mr. Horace Wal- 
pole (whose over-critical book she had not even 
condescended to acknowledge) had thought fit 
to designate him. It was as a painter pure and 



106 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

simple, as a rival of the Guidos and Correggios, 
that she mainly valued her William. ' They 
said he could not colour I ' she would cry, point- 
ing, it may be, as a protest against the words, 
to the brilliant sketch of the 'Shrimp Girl,' now 
in the National Gallery, but then upon her 
walls. Or, turning from his merits to his mem- 
ory, she would throw a shawl about her hand- 
some head, and, stepping out under the over- 
hanging bay-window into the old three-cornered 
garden with its filbert avenue and its great 
mulberry tree, would exhibit the little mural 
tablet which Hogarth had himself scratched with 
a nail, in remembrance of a favourite bullfinch. 
1 Alass poor Dick, 1 ran the now faint inscription, 
not without characteristic revelation of the 
sculptor's faulty spelling. And if she happened 
to be in one of the more confidential moods of 
old age, she would perhaps take from a drawer 
that very No. 17 of the ' North Briton,' stained 
and frayed at the folds, which she afterwards 
gave to Ireland, and which her husband, she 
would tell you, had carried about in his pocket 
for days to show to sympathetic friends. ' The 
supposed Author of the Analysis of Beauty ! ' — 
she would indignantly exclaim, quoting from the 
opening lines of Wilkes's nefarious print, headed 
with its rude woodcut parody of Hogarth's por- 



Hogarth's Sigismunda. 107 

trait in ' Calais Gate,' 1 and then, turning the 
blunt-lettered page, she would point silently 
to the passages relating to the much-abused 
' Sigismunda,' concerning which, if her hearers 
were still judiciously inquisitive, they would, 
in all probability, receive a gracious invitation 
to test the truth of the libel by inspecting that 
masterpiece itself at its home in her London 
house. 

By November, 1789, however, all this had 
become part of the irrevocable past. In that 
month Mrs. Hogarth had been laid beside her 
mother and her husband under the tomb in Chis- 
wick churchyard ; the little * country box ' had 
passed to Mary Lewis ; and — by direction of the 
same lady — the contents of the ' Golden Head ' 

1 The original No. 17 of the 'North Briton/ dated 
Saturday, September 25, 1762, had no portrait. The 
portrait was added to a reprint of Wilkes's article issued 
May 21, 1763, or immediately after the appearance of Ho- 
garth's etching of Wilkes. Since the above paper was first 
published in America, this interesting relic of Hogarth has 
once more come to light. In April, 1845, it was sold with 
Mr. H.P. Standly's collection. At the sale, in February, 
1892, of Dr. J. R. Joly's Hogarth prints and books, it 
passed (with some of the Standly correspondence) to 
Mr. James Tregaskis, the well-known bookseller at the 
' Caxton Head ' in Holborn, from whom it was acquired 
by the present writer. 



108 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

in Leicester Square were shortly afterwards 
(April, 1790) announced for sale. In the Print- 
Room at the British Museum, where is also the 
original manuscript of the famous ' Five Days' 
Tour' of 1732, is a copy of the auctioneer's 
catalogue, which once belonged to George 
Steevens. It is not a document of many pages. 
At Mrs. Hogarth's death, her income from the 
prints, exclusive property in which had been 
secured to her in 1767 by special Act of Parlia- 
ment, had greatly fallen off ; and though she 
had received the further aid of a small pension 
from the Royal Academy, it is to be presumed 
that her means were considerably straitened. 
It is known, too, that there had been lodgers 
at the ' Golden Head/ one being the engraver 
Richard Livesay, another the strange Ossianic 
enthusiast and friend of Fuseli, Alexander Run- 
ciman ; and obviously nothing but ' strong ne- 
cessity ' could justify the reception of lodgers. 
These circumstances must explain the slender 
contents of Mr. Greenwood's little pamphlet. 
Many of the treasures of William Hogarth's 
household had already become the prey of the 
collector, or had passed to admiring friends ; 
and what remained to be finally dispersed under 
the hammer practically consisted of family relics. 
There was Hogarth's own likeness of himself 



Hogarth's Sigismunda. 109 

and his dog, soon to become the property of 
Mr. Angerstein, from whom it passed to the 
National Gallery; there was another whole- 
length painting of him ; there was Roubillac's 
clever terra cotta, at present in the Bethnal 
Green collection of portraits ; there was a cast 
of the faithful Trump, and one of Hogarth's 
hand ; there were the portraits of his sisters 
Mary and Ann, which now belong to Mr. R. C. 
Nichols. Other items were a set of ' twelve 
Delft ware plates,' painted with the signs of the 
zodiac by Sir James Thornhill ; portraits of Sir 
James and his wife ; of Mrs. Hogarth herself; 
of Hogarth's six servants ; and there were also 
numerous framed examples of his prints. 1 But 
the most important object in the sale was un- 
doubtedly the famous ' Sigismunda.' 

' Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of 
Guiscardo ' is the full title of the picture in the 
National Gallery catalogue. As one looks at 
it now, asylumed safely, post tot discrimina, in 
Trafalgar Square, it is not so much its qualities 
as its story that it recalls. How much heart- 
burning, how much bitterness, would have been 
saved to its sturdy little ' Author,' as he loved 
to style himself, if it had never been projected 1 

1 By a piece of auction-room waggery, ' The Bathos ' 
appears as ' The Bathers.' 



no Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

He was an unparalleled pictorial satirist ; he 
was, and still is, an unsurpassed story-teller 
upon canvas. 

1 In walks of Humour, in that cast of Style, 
Which, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile ; 
In Comedy, thy nat'ral road to fame, 
Nor let me call it by a meaner name, 
Where a beginning, middle, and an end 
Are aptly joined : where parts on parts depend, 
Each made for each, as bodies for their soul, 
So as to form one true and perfect whole, 
Where a plain story to the eye is told, 
Which we conceive the moment we behold, 
Hogarth unrivall'd stands, and shall engage 
Unrivall'd praise to the most distant age ' 

Thus even his enemy and assailant, Charles 
Churchill. But Hogarth had the misfortune to 
live in an age when Art was given over to the 
bubblemongers and ' black masters ; ' when, to 
the suppression of native talent, sham chefs 
cTceuvre were praised extravagantly by sham 
connoisseurs ; and the patriotic painter of ' Mar- 
riage A-la-Mode 1 justly resented the invasion of 
the country by the rubbish of the Roman art- 
factories. Had he confined himself to the for- 
cible indignation of which, as an impenitent 
islander, he possessed unlimited command, it 
would have been better for his peace of mind. 
But, in an unpropitious hour, he undertook to 



Hogarth's Sigismnnda. m 

prove his case by demonstration. Among the 
pictures from Sir Luke Schaub's collection, 
offered for sale in 1758, was a 'Sigismunda, 1 
attributed to Correggio, but in reality from the 
brush of the far inferior artist, Furini. It was 
recklessly run up by the virtuosi, and was finally 
bought in for over ^"400. Hogarth, whose 
inimitable * Marriage ' had fetched only ^"126 
(frames included), determined to paint the same 
subject. He had an open commission from Sir 
Richard Grosvenor, a wealthy art-collector, who 
had been one of the bidders for the Furini, and 
he set to work. He took unusual pains — a 
thing which, in his case, was of evil augury ; 
and he modified the details of his design again 
and again, in obedience to the suggestions of 
friends. When at last the picture was com- 
pleted, Sir Richard, who, perhaps not unreason- 
ably, had looked for something more in the 
artist's individual manner, took advantage of 
Hogarth's conventional offer to release him from 
his bargain, and rather shabbily withdrew from 
it upon the specious ground ' that the constantly 
having it [the picture] before one's eyes would 
be too often occasioning melancholy ideas ' — 
a sentiment which the irritated painter, calling 
verse to his relief, afterwards neatly paraphrased. 
Admitting its power to touch the heart to be the 



ii2 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

* truest test ' of a masterpiece, he says of 
1 Sigismunda' : 

* Nay , 't is so moving that the Knight 
Can't even bear it in his sight ; 
Then who would tears so dearly buy, 
As give four hundred pounds to cry ? 
I own, he chose the prudent part, 
Rather to break his word than heart ; 
And yet, methinks, 't is ticklish dealing 
With one so delicate — in feeling ' 

As a result of Sir Richard Grosvenor's action, 
the picture remained on the artist's hands, — a 
source of continual mortification to himself, and 
a fruitful theme of discussion to both his friends 
and enemies. The political caricaturists got 
hold of it, and used it as a stick to beat the pen- 
sionary of Lord Bute ; the critics employed it 
to continue their assaults on the precepts of the 
1 Analysis.' When Wilkes retorted to Hogarth's 
ill-advised print of the 4 Times, 1 he openly de- 
scribed ' Sigismunda ' as a portrait of Mrs. Ho- 
garth ' in an agony of passion ; ' and the fact that 
she had served as her husband's model was not 
neglected by his meaner assailants. Finally, 
after various attempts had been made to en- 
grave it, the picture was left by the artist to his 
widow with injunctions not to sell it for less 
than ;£$oo. After her death it was bought at 



Hogarth's Sigismnnda. 113 

the ' Golden Head ' sale for £j6 by Alderman 
Boydell. As already stated, it is now in the 
National Gallery, to which it was bequeathed 
by the late Mr. Anderdon in 1879. 

In the couplets already quoted, Hogarth had 
ended by saying : 

' Let the picture rust. 
Perhaps Time's price-enhancing dust, 
As statues moulder into earth, 
When I 'm no more, may mark its worth ; 
And future connoisseurs may rise, 
Honest as ours, and full as wise, 
To puff the piece and painter too, 
And make me then what Guido 's now.' 

To some extent the reaction he hoped for has 
arrived. The latter-day student of ' Sigismunda,' 
unblinded by political prejudice or private ani- 
mosity, renders full justice to the soundness of 
its execution and the undoubted skill of its 
technique. Indeed, at the present moment, the 
tendency seems to be rather to overrate than to 
underrate its praiseworthy qualities. Yet, when 
all is said, the subject remains an unattractive and 
even a repulsive one. It must be admitted also 
that, in one respect, contemporary critics were 
right. They were wrong in their unreasoning 
preference for doubtful ' exotics,' but they were 
right in their contention that, upon this occasion, 

8 



ii4 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Hogarth had strayed perilously from his own 
peculiar walk, and that so-called ' history paint- 
ing ' was not his strongest point. Conscientious 
and painstaking, ' Sigismunda ' is still a mistake, 
although it is the mistake of a great artist ; and 
Hogarth's recorded partiality for it affords but 
one more example of that unaccountable blind- 
ness which led Addison to put his poems before 
the 'Spectator,' Prior to rank his 'Solomon' 
above the ' loose and hasty scribble ' of 'Alma,' 
and Liston, whose nose alone was provocative 
of laughter, to cherish the extraordinary delu- 
sion that his true vocation was that of a tragic 
actor. 



'THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD. 

*V\T HAT was it that suggested to Goldsmith 
^* ' The Citizen of the World ' ? Biographers 
and commentators have pointed to more than 
one plausible model, — the ' Lettres Persanes ' 
of Montesquieu, the ' Lettres d'une Peruvienne ' 
of Madame de Graffigny, the ' Lettres Chi- 
noises ' of the Marquis d'Argens, the ' Asiatic ' 
of Voltaire's ' Lettres Philosophiques.' But it 
is sometimes wise, especially in such hand-to- 
mouth work as journalism, which was all Gold- 
smith at first intended, to seek for origins in the 
immediate neighbourhood rather than in remoter 
places. In 1757 Horace Walpole published 
anonymously, in pamphlet form, a clever little 
squib upon Admiral Byng's trial in particular 
and English inconstancy in general, which he 
entitled ' A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese 
Philosopher at London, to his friend Lien Chi, 
at Peking.' This was briefly noticed in the 
May issue of the ' Monthly Review,' where 
Goldsmith was then acting as scribbler-general 



n6 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

to Griffiths, the proprietor of the magazine (his 
reviews of Home's ' Douglas ' and of Burke's 
' Sublime and Beautiful ' appeared in the same 
number), and it was described as in Montes- 
quieu's manner. A year later Goldsmith is 
writing mysteriously to his friend Bob Bryanton, 
of Ballymulvey, in Ireland, about a ' Chinese 
whom he shall soon make talk like an English- 
man ; ' and when at last his ' Chinese Letters/ 
as they were called at first, begin to appear in 
Newbery's ' Public Ledger/ he takes for the 
name of his Oriental, Lien Chi Altangi, one of 
Walpole's imaginary correspondents having been 
Lien Chi. This chain of association, if slight, 
is strong enough to justify some connection. 
The fundamental idea, no doubt, was far older 
than either Walpole or Goldsmith ; but it is not 
too much to suppose that Walpole's jeu d'esprit 
supplied just that opportune suggestion which 
produced the remarkable and now too-much- 
neglected series of letters afterwards reprinted 
under the general title of 4 The Citizen of the 
World.' 

1 The metaphors and allusions/ says Gold- 
smith in one of those admirable prefaces of 
which he possessed the secret, ' are all drawn 
from the East ; ' and in another place he tells us 
that a certain apostrophe is wholly translated 



' The Citizen of the World.' 117 

from Ambulaaohamed, a real (or fictitious) Ara- 
bian poet. To these ingenuities he no doubt 
attached the exaggerated importance habitually 
assigned to work which has cost its writer pains. 
But it is not the adroitness of his adaptations 
from Le Comte and Du Halde that most de-- 
tains us now. The purely Oriental part of 
the work — although it includes the amusing 
story (an ' Ephesian Matron ' a la Chinoise) 
of the widow who, in her haste to marry again, 
fans her late husband's grave to dry it quicker, 
and the apologue of Prince Bonbennin and the 
White Mouse — is practically dead wood. It is 
Goldsmith under the transparent disguise of 
Lien Chi — Goldsmith commenting, after the 
manner of Addison and Steele, upon Georgian 
England, that attracts and interests the modern 
reader. His Chinese Philosopher might well 
have wondered at the lazy puddle moving mud- 
dily along the ill-kept London streets, at the 
large feet and white teeth of the women, at the 
unwieldy signs with their nondescript devices, 
at the unaccountable fashion of lying-in-state ; 
but it is Goldsmith, and Goldsmith only, who 
could have imagined the admirable humour of 
the dialogue on liberty between a prisoner 
(through his grating), a porter pausing from 
his burden to denounce slavery and the French, 



n8 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

and a soldier who, with a tremendous oath, 
advocates, above all, the importance of religion. 
It is Goldsmith again — the Goldsmith of Green- 
Arbour-Court and Griffiths 1 back-parlour — who 
draws, from a harder experience than could 
have been possible to Lien Chi, the satiric pic- 
ture of the so-called republic of letters which 
forms his twentieth epistle. ' Each looks upon 
his fellow as a rival, not an assistant in the same 
pursuit. They calumniate, they injure, they 
despise, they ridicule each other : if one man 
writes a book that pleases, others shall write 
books to show that he might have given still 
greater pleasure, or should not have pleased. 
If one happens to hit upon something new, there 
are numbers ready to assure the public that all 
this was no novelty to them or the learned ; that 
Cardanus or Brunus, or some other author too 
dull to be generally read, had anticipated the 
discovery. Thus, instead of uniting like the 
members of a commonwealth, they are divided 
into almost as many factions as there are men ; 
and their jarring constitution, instead of being 
styled a republic of letters, should be entitled, 
an anarchy of literature.' One rubs one's eyes 
as one reads ; one asks oneself under one's 
breath if it is of our day that the satirist is 
speaking. No ; it is of the reign of the second 



' The Citizen of the World.' 119 

of the Georges, before Grub Street was turned 
into Milton Street. 

Literature, in its different aspects, plays not 
a small part in the lucubrations of Lien Chi. 
Two of the best letters are devoted to a whim- 
sical description of the vagaries of some of its 
humbler professors, who hold a Saturday Club 
at the * Broom ' at Islington; others treat of 
the decay of poetry ; of novels, and ' Tristram 
Shandy ' in particular ; of the necessity of in- 
trigue or riches as a means to success. Nor 
are art and the drama neglected. The virtuoso, 
who afforded such a fund of amusement to 
Fielding and Smollett, receives his full share of 
attention ; and in the papers upon acting and 
actors, Goldsmith once more displays that criti- 
cal common-sense which he had shown so con- 
spicuously in ' The Bee.' Travellers and their 
trivialities are freely ridiculed ; there are papers 
on Newmarket, on the Marriage Act, on the 
coronation, on the courts of justice ; on quacks, 
gaming, paint, mourning, and mad dogs. There 
is a letter on the irreverent behaviour of the 
congregation in St. Paul's ; there is another on 
the iniquity of making shows of public monu- 
ments. Now and then a more serious note is 
touched, as when the author is stirred to un- 
wonted gravity by the savage penal code of his 



120 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

day, which, ' cementing the laws with blood/ 
closed every avenue with a gibbet, and against 
which Johnson too lifted his sonorous voice. 

' Scarce can our fields, such crowds at Tyburn die, 
With hemp the gallows and the fleet supply/ — 

he sang in ' London,' anticipating his later 
utterances in ' The Rambler.' Goldsmith, on 
the other hand, crystallized in his verse the raw 
material of which he made his Chinese philo- 
sopher the mouthpiece. Several of the best 
known passages of his two longest poems 
have their first form in the prose of Lien Chi. 
Indeed, one actual line of ' The Traveller,' ' A 
land of tyrants, and a den of slaves,' is simply a 
textual quotation from ' The Citizen of the 
World.' 

But what in the Chinese letters is even more 
remarkable than their clever raillery of social 
incongruities and abuses, is their occasional 
indication of the author's innate but hitherto 
undisclosed gift for the delineation of humor- 
ous character. Up to this time he had exhibited 
no particular tendency in this direction. The 
little sketches of Jack Spindle and ' my cousin 
Hannah,' in ' The Bee,' go no farther than the 
corresponding personifications of particular qual- 
ities in the ' Spectator ' and ' Tatler ; ' and they 



' The Citizen of the World.' 121 

are not of the kind which, to employ a French 
figure, ' enter the skin ' of the personality pre- 
sented. But in the case of the eccentric phi- 
lanthropist of ' The Citizen of the World/ whom 
he christens the ' Man in Black,' he comes 
nearer to such a definite embodiment as Addi- 
son's ' Will Wimble.' The < Man in Black ' is 
evidently a combination of some of those Gold- 
smith family traits which were afterwards so 
successfully recalled in Dr. Primrose, Mr. 
Hardcastle, and the clergyman of ' The De- 
serted Village.' The contrast between his 
credulous charity and his expressed distrust of 
human nature, between his simulated harshness 
and his real amiability, constitutes a type which 
has since been often used successfully in Eng- 
lish literature ; it is clear, too, that in the 
account of his life he borrows both from his 
author and his author's father. When he 
speaks of his unwillingness to take orders, of 
his dislike to wear a long wig when he pre- 
ferred a short one, or a black coat when he 
dressed in brown, he is only giving expression 
to that incompatibility of temper which led to 
Goldsmith's rejection for ordination by the 
Bishop of Elphin ; while in his picture of his 
father's house, with its simple, kindly prodigal- 
ity, its little group of grateful parasites who 



122 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

laugh, like Mr. Hardcastle's servants, at the 
host's old jokes, and the careless paternal be- 
nevolence which makes the children ' mere 
machines of pity,' ' instructed in the art of giv- 
ing away thousands before they were taught 
the more necessary qualifications of getting a 
farthing,' one recognises the environment of 
that emphatically Irish household on the road 
from Ballymahon to Athlone, in which Gold- 
smith's own boyhood had been spent. 

Excellent as he is, however, the ' Man in 
Black,' with his grudging generosity and his 
1 reluctant goodness,' is surpassed in complete- 
ness of characterization by the more finished 
portrait of Beau Tibbs. The poor little pinched 
pretender to fashion, with his tarnished finery 
and his reed-voiced, simpering helpmate, — with 
his coffee-house cackle of my Lord Mudlerand 
the Duchess of Piccadilly, and his magnificent 
promises of turbot and ortolan, which issue 
pitifully in postponed ox-cheek and bitter beer, 
— approaches the dimensions of a masterpiece. 
Charles Lamb, one would think, must have 
rejoiced over the reckless assurance which ex- 
patiates on the charming view of the Thames 
from the garret of a back-street in the suburbs, 
which glorifies the * paltry, unframed pictures ' 
on its walls into essays in the manner of the 



' The Citizen of the World.' 123 

celebrated Grisoni, and transforms a surly Scotch 
hag-of-all-work into an old and privileged family- 
servant, — the gift ' of a friend of mine, a Par- 
liament man from the Highlands.' Nor are 
there many pages in Dickens more perennially 
humorous than the scene in which the ' Man in 
Black,' his inamorata the pawnbroker's widow, 
and Mr. and Mrs. Tibbs, all make a party to 
the picturesque old Vauxhall Gardens of Jona- 
than Tyers. The inimitable sparring which 
ensues between the second-hand gentility of 
the beau's lady and the moneyed vulgarity of 
the tradesman's relict, their different and wholly 
irreconcilable views of the entertainment, and 
the tragic termination of the whole, by which 
the widow is balked of ' the waterworks ' be- 
cause good manners constrain her to sit out the 
wire-drawn roulades and quavers of Mrs. Tibbs 
— these are things which age cannot wither 
nor custom stale. If Goldsmith had written 
nothing but this miniature trilogy of Beau 
Tibbs, — if Dr. Primrose were uninvented and 
Tony Lumpkin non-existent, — he would still 
have earned a perpetual place among English 
humorists. 

Something of this, undoubtedly, he owed to 
the fortunate instinct which dictated his choice 
of his material. The forerunner of Dickens, — 



124 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

the disciple, although he knew it not, of Field- 
ing, — he makes his capital by his disregard of 
the reigning models of his time. Declining to 
select his characters from the fashionable ab- 
stractions of Sentimental Comedy and the me- 
chanical puppets of conventional High Life, he 
turns aside to the moving, various, many-coloured 
middle-classes, from whose ranks originality has 
not yet been banished, or nature cast out. Of 
these he had knowledge and experience ; of 
those he had seen but little. Upon the other 
walk, his labours might have been as forgotten 
as the ' Henry' of Richard Cumberland or the 
1 Henrietta' of Mrs. Charlotte Lenox. But he 
took his own line ; and in consequence, Beau 
Tibbs and the pawnbroker's widow (with her 
rings and her green damask) are as much alive 
to-day as Partridge or Mrs. Nickleby. 



AN OLD LONDON BOOKSELLER. 

4 FjEC. 22. Mr. John Newbery, of St. Paul's 
■*^ churchyard, sincerely lamented by all who 
knew him.' These words, copied from the 
1 Gentleman's Magazine ' for 1767, record the 
death of one who, in his way, was an eighteenth 
century notability. He belonged to the good old 
1 Keep-your-Shop-and-your-Shop-will-keep-you ' 
class of tradesmen, who lived without pretence 
over their places of business in the City, 
worked industriously during the week, marched 
off to St. Bride's or St. Dunstan's on Sunday 
morning with a crop-eared 'prentice in the 
rear to carry the great gilt Bible, and jogged 
away in crowded chaises of summer afternoons 
to eat tarts at Highgate or drink tea out of 
china in the Long Room at Bagnigge Wells. 
In due time they made their ' plumbs ; ' sent their 
sons to St. Paul's or Merchant Taylors', some- 
times even to Oxford or Cambridge ; and finally 
left their portraits to posterity in the becoming 
and worshipful garb of Sheriffs or Common-coun- 
cilmen. Unfortunately for this paper, there is 



126 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

no such limner's likeness of ' honest John New- 
bery.' Yet we are not wholly without details 
as to his character and personal appearance, 
That ' glorious pillar of unshaken orthodoxy,' 
Dr. Primrose, formerly of Wakefield, for whom, 
as all the world knows, he had published a 
pamphlet ' against the Deuterogamists of the 
age,' describes him as a red-faced good-natured 
little man, who was always in a hurry. ' He 
was no sooner alighted,' says the worthy Vicar, 
1 but he was in haste to be gone ; for he was ever 
on business of the utmost importance.' ' Mr. 
Idler' confirms this indication. 'When he 
enters a house, his first declaration is, that he 
cannot sit down ; and so short are his visits, 
that he seldom appears to have come for any 
other reason but to say, He must go.' It is 
not difficult to fill in the outline of Johnson and 
Goldsmith. 'The philanthropic bookseller in St. 
Paul's church-yard ' was plainly a bustling, multi- 
farious, and not unkindly personage, essentially 
commercial, essentially enterprising, rigorously 
exacting his money's worth of work, keeping 
prudent record of all casual cash advances, but, 
on the whole, not unbeneficent in his business 
fashion to the needy brethren of the pen by whom 
he was surrounded. Many of John Newbery's 
guineas passed to Johnson, to Goldsmith, to 






An Old London Bookseller. 127 

poor mad Christopher Smart, who married his 
step-daughter. As Johnson implies, it is not 
impossible that he finally fell a victim to that 
unreasoning mental activity which left him al- 
ways struggling hopelessly with more schemes 
and proposals than one man could possibly 
manage. His wig must often have been awry, 
and his spectacles mislaid, in that perpetual 
journey from pillar to post which ultimately 
landed him, at the comparatively early age of 
fifty-four, in his grave at Waltham St. Lawrence. 
It was at Waltham St. Lawrence, a quiet 
little Berkshire village, whose churchyard is 
dotted with the tombs of earlier Newberys, 
that he had been born. His father, a small 
farmer, destined him for his own calling. But, 
like Gay, it was not John Newbery's fate ' to 
brighten ploughshares in paternal land.' He 
passed early into the service of a ' merchant,' 
otherwise a printer and newspaper proprietor, 
at Reading, managing so well that, when his 
employer died, he was left a co-legatee in the 
business. Thereupon, being a resolute man, 
he did better still, and married his master's 
widow, who had three children. Even this 
succeeded ; upon which, progressing always in 
prosperity, he began to think of starting in 
London. Before doing so, he made a tour in 



128 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

the provinces. Of this expedition there exists 
a curious record in the shape of an unprinted 
journal, throwing much light upon modes of 
travelling in those early coaching days, when 
the unfortunate outside passenger (like Pastor 
Moritz in a later paper 1 ) had to choose between 
being jolted to death in the basket, or clinging 
like a fly to the slippery top of the vehicle. 
The majority of the entries are merely matter 
of business, — titles for new books, recipes for 
diet-drinks, shrewd trade maxims, and the like. 
But here and there the writer intersperses notes 
of general interest, — on Dick Turpin the high- 
wayman, on Lady Godiva and peeping Tom, 
and (more than once) upon that ' curious and 
very useful machine,' the Ducking-Stool for 
scolds, a ' plan of which instrument (he says) 
he shall procure and transplant to Berkshire 
for the good of his native county.' His busi- 
ness at Reading was as miscellaneous as his 
memorandum book, and he seems to have dealt 
in all kinds of goods. About 1744 he removed 
to London, opening a shop at the sign of the 
' Bible and Crown/ near Devereux Court, 
without Temple Bar, together with a branch 
establishment at the Royal Exchange. To this 
Johnson probably refers when he says : ' He has 
1 See ' A German in England.' 



An Old London Bookseller. 129 

one habitation near Bow Church, and another 
about a mile distant. By this ingenious distribu- 
tion of himself between two houses, he has con- 
trived to be found at neither.' From the ' Bible 
and Crown/ which had been his old Reading 
sign, he moved a year later to the ' Bible and 
Sun' in St. Paul's Churchyard. This continued 
to be his headquarters until his death. Gradu- 
ally his indiscriminate activities narrowed them- 
selves to two distinct branches of business, in 
these days incongruous enough, — the sale of 
books and the sale of patent medicines. While 
at Reading, he had become part owner of Dr. 
Hooper's Female Pills (can pills have a sex ?) ; 
and soon after his settlement in London, he ac- 
quired the sole management of a more famous 
panacea, Dr. James's Fever Powders, which 
had in their time an extraordinary vogue. Ac- 
cording to Mrs. Delany, the King dosed the 
Princess Elizabeth with them ; Gray and 
Cowper both believed in their efficacy ; and 
Horace Walpole declared he should take them 
if the house were on fire. Fielding specially 
praises them in ' Amelia,' affirming that in almost 
any country but England, they would have 
brought ' public Honours and Rewards ' to his 
'worthy and ingenious. Friend Dr. James;' 
while Goldsmith may be said to have laid down 

9 



130 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

his life for them. With the sale of these and 
kindred specifics, John Newbery alternated his 
unwearied speculations as a bookseller. He 
was at the back of Smollett's venture of the 
' British Magazine; ' it was for his ' Universal 
Chronicle ' that Johnson wrote his ' Idler ' and 
quizzed his proprietor as ' Jack Whirler ; ' he 
was the publisher of Goldsmith's ' Traveller ' 
and ' Citizen of the World ; ' and he probably 
found part of the historical sixty guineas which 
somebody paid for the ' Vicar of Wakefield.' 
He died at Canbury or Canonbury House, 
Islington, in the still-existent Tower of which 
he was an occasional resident. Indeed, it is 
more than probable that he was at one time 
the responsible landlord of that favourite retir- 
ing place for literary men, — a retiring place not 
without its exceptional advantages, if we are to 
believe last-century advertisements, which, in 
addition to a natural cold bath, speak of ' a 
superlative Room, furnish'd for a single Person, 
or two Gentlemen, having a Prospect into five 
Counties [' longos prospicit agros!'], and the 
use of a good Garden and Summer-House.' 
Besides this there were traditions of Prior 
Bolton and Anne of Cleves, of Bacon and 
Elizabeth, of Sir John Spencer and William 
Fielding, Earl of Denbigh (the novelist's grand- 



An Old London Bookseller. 131 

uncle), which should certainly have figured in 
any schedule of attractions, and must naturally 
have been interesting to the Smarts and Hills 
and Woodfalls and Goldsmiths who afterwards 
inhabited the old ivy-clad Tower. 

Newbery's epitaph in the churchyard of his 
native village lays its main stress upon his con- 
nection with Dr. James's nostrum ; and it was 
doubtless to this and the other patent medi- 
cines with which he was connected that he 
owed the material part of his prosperity. Yet 
it is not now upon the celebrated ' Arquebusade 
Water,' or the far-famed ' Cephalic Snuff,' or 
the incomparable ' Beaume de Vie, 1 once so 
familiar in eighteenth-century advertisements, 
that he bases his individual claim to the grati- 
tude of posterity. It is, to quote his biographer, 
Mr. Welsh, as ' the first bookseller who made 
the issue of books, specially intended for chil- 
dren, a business of any importance ; ' as the 
publisher of ' The Renowned History of Giles 
Gingerbread : a little Boy who lived upon 
Learning,' of ' Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes ' (after- 
ward Lady Jones), of the redoubtable ' Tommy 
Trip and his dog Jouler,' of the ' Lilliputian 
Magazine,' and of numbers of other tiny master- 
pieces in that flowered and gilt Dutch paper of 
which the art has been lost, that he is best 



132 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

remembered. Concerning these commendable 
little treatises, with their matter-of-fact title- 
pages and their artless appeal to all little Mas- 
ters and Misses ' who are good, or intend to 
be good,' there are varying opinions. Dr. John- 
son, according to Mrs. Thrale, thought them too 
childish for their purpose. He preferred the 
4 Seven Champions,' or ' Parisenus and Paris- 
menus.' ' Babies,' he said in his legislative way, 
' do not want to hear about babies. They like to 
be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat 
which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.' 
i Remember always,' he added, ' that the par- 
ents buy the books, and that the children 
never read them.' Yet it is claimed for Robert 
Southey that in Newbery's ' delectable histories' 
he found just that very stimulus which made him 
a lifelong book-lover ; and it is characteristic 
of Charles Lamb (a better judge of children's 
literature than Johnson) that he puts forward 
these particular publications against the Bar- 
baulds and Trimmers (' those blights and blasts 
of all that is human in man and child '), as pre- 
senting the very quality which Johnson desired, 
the ' beautiful interest in wild tales, which made 
the child a man, while all the time he suspected 
himself to be no bigger than a child.' ' Think 
what you would have been now,' he writes to 



An Old London Bookseller. 133 

Coleridge of ' Goody Two-Shoes/ ' if instead 
of being fed with tales and old wives' fables 
in childhood, you had been crammed with 
geography and natural history ! ' 

The authorship of these ' classics of the nur- 
sery ' is an old battle ground. Newbery, it is 
alleged, wrote some of them himself. He was 
(says Dr. Primrose when he met him) ' at that 
time actually compiling materials for the history 
of one Mr. Thomas Trip,' and if this can hardly 
be accepted as proof positive, it may be safely 
asserted that to Newbery's business instinct 
are due those ingenious references to his dif- 
ferent wares and publications which crop up so 
unexpectedly in the course of the narrative. 
For example, in ' Goody Two-Shoes ' we are 
told that the heroine's father ' died miserably ' 
because he was * seized with a violent Fever in 
a Place where Dr. James's Powder was not to 
be had ' 1 But who were Newbery's assistant 
authors ? Giles and Griffith Jones, say some ; 
Oliver Goldsmith, say others. With respect to 
the last-named no particular testimony seems to 
be forthcoming beyond his known relations to the 
publisher, and the so-called ' evidence of style.' 
In the absence of confirmatory details the former 
is worthless ; and the latter is often entirely 
misleading. Without going back to the time- 



134 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

honoured case of Erasmus and Scaliger's ora- 
tion, two modern instances of this may be 
cited. Mr. Thackeray, says Mr. Forster, 
claimed the ' Pleasant and Delightful History 
of Thomas Hickathrift' for Henry Fielding. 
But both Mr. Forster and Mr. Thackeray 
should have remembered that their common 
acquaintance, Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, of the 
'Tatler,' had written of Hickathrift as a chap- 
book when Fielding was a baby. In the same 
way ' Tommy Trip ' has, by no mean judges, 
been attributed to Goldsmith upon the strength 
of the following quatrain : — 

' Three children sliding on the ice 

Upon a summer's day, 
As it fell out they all fell in, 
The rest they ran away.' 

Alas 1 and alas ! for the ' evidence of style.' 
Not only had these identical lines been turned 
into Latin in the * Gentleman's Magazine ' for 
July, 1754, when Goldsmith was still studying 
medicine at Leyden ; but they are quoted at p. 
30 of ' The Character of Richard St[ee]le, Esq ; ' 
by * Toby, Abel's Kinsman/ which was issued by 
'J. Morphew, near Stationer's Hair as far back 
as the month of November, 171 3. As a matter 
of fact, they are much older still, being affirmed 



An Old London Bookseller, 135 

by Chambers in his excellent ' Book of Days ' 
to be, in their first form, part of a long and 
rambling story in doggerel rhyme dating from 
the early part of the Civil Wars, which is to be 
found at the end of a little old book entitled 
-The Loves of Hero and Leander,' i2mo, 
London, 1653, and 1677. 



GRAY'S LIBRARY. 

A MONG Gray's papers was one inscribed 
"^^ ' Dialogue of Books.' The handwriting 
was that of his biographer Mason, but it was 
believed to be either by Gray or by West. 
There is a strong presumption that the author 
was Gray ; and it is accordingly attributed to 
him in Mr. D. C. Tovey's ' Gray and his 
Friends/ where for the first time it was printed. 
It shows us the little great man (if it is accu- 
rately dated 1742, it must have been in the year 
of his fullest poetical activity) sitting tranquilly 
in his study chair, when he is ' suddenly alarmd 
with a great hubbub of Tongues.' He listens ; 
and finds that his books are talking to one an- 
other. Madame de Sevigne is being what Mrs. 
Gamp would call ' scroudged ' by Aristotle, who 
replies to her compressed expostulations with 
all the brutality of a philosopher and a realist. 
Thereupon she appeals to her relative, the 
author of the ' Histoire amoureuse des Gaules/ 
But the gallant M. Bussy-Rabutin, himself 



Gray's Library. 137 

pining for an interchange of compliments with 
a neighbouring Catullus, is hopelessly penned 
in by a hulking edition of Strabo, and cannot 
possibly arrive to the assistance of his belle 
Cousine. Elsewhere La Bruyere comments 
upon the strange companions with whom Fate 
has acquainted him ; and Locke observes, with 
a touch of temper, that he is associated with 
Ovid, — and Ray the Naturalist ! 1 Virgil pla- 
cidly quotes a line of his own poems ; More, 
the Platonist, delivers himself of a neat little 
copy-book sentiment in praise of theological 
speculation ; and great fat Dr. Cheyne huskily 
mutters his own adage, ' Every man after forty 
is either a fool or a Physician.' In another 
corner an ill-judged and irrelevant remark by 
Euclid, touching the dimensions of a point, 
brings down upon him the scorn both of Swift 
and Boileau, who clamour for the unconditional 
suppression of mathematics. (If there be noth- 
ing else, this in itself is almost sufficient to fix 
the authorship of the paper with Gray, whose 
hatred of mathematics was only equalled by that 
of Goldsmith.) Then a pert exclamation from 
a self-sufficient Vade Mecum provokes the 

1 Ray's ' Select Remains ' with life by Derham, 1740, 
and many marginal notes by Gray, was recently in a 
London bookseller's catalogue. 



138 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

owner of the library to so hearty an outburst 
of merriment that the startled tomes at once 
shrink back into ' uncommunicating muteness.' 
Laughter, it would seem, is as fatal to books as 
it was of old to the Coquecigrues. 

Whether Gray's library ever again broke 
silence, his biographers have not related. But 
if his books were pressed for space while in his 
possession, they have since enjoyed ample op- 
portunities for change of air and scene. When 
he died he left them, with his manuscripts, to 
Mason, who in turn bequeathed them to the 
poet's friend Stonehewer, from whom they 
passed, in part, to a relative, Mr. Bright of Skef- 
fington Hall. At Mr. Bright's death, being 
family property, they were sold by auction. In 
August, 185 1, they were again offered for sale ; 
and three years later a number of them, which 
had apparently been reserved or bought in, 
once more came under the hammer at Sotheby 
and Wilkinson's. We have before us the cata- 
logue of the second sale, which is naturally 
much fuller than that of 18^4. What strikes one 
first is the care with which the majority of the 
volumes had been preserved by their later pos- 
sessors. Many of the Note-Books were cush- 
ioned on velvet in special cases, while the more 
precious manuscripts had been skilfully inlaid, 



Gray's Library. 139 

and bound in olive morocco with leather joints 
and linings of crimson silk. Like Prior, Gray 
must have preserved almost everything, ' e'en 
from his boyish days.' Among the books is 
' Plutarch's Lives,' with Dacier's notes, and 
the inscription, ' E libris Thomse Gray, Scholae 
Eton: Alumn. Januar. 22, 1733 ' — a year before 
he left for Cambridge ; there is also his copy of 
Pope's ' Iliad,' with autograph date a year ear- 
lier; there is a still more youthful (though 
perhaps more suspicious) possession — namely, 
three volumes of Dryden's ' Virgil,' which were 
said to have actually belonged to Pope. ' Ex 
Libris A. Pope, 17 10,' was written at the back 
of the portrait, and the same inscription recurred 
in each volume, though in the others some 
Vandal, probably a classmate, by adding a tail 
to the ' P ' and an 'r' at the end, had turned 
the ' Pope ' into ' Roper.' Another of Gray's 
Eton books was a Waller, acquired in 1729, in 
which favourite poems and passages were under- 
lined. 

Of the classics he must have been a most un- 
wearied and sedulous student. Euripides he 
read in the great folio of Joshua Barnes (Cantab. 
1694), which is marked throughout by a special 
system of stars, inverted commas, and lines in 
red crayon ; and his note-books bristle with ex- 



140 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

tracts, neatly ' arranged and digested,' from all 
the best Greek authors — Sophocles, Thucy- 
dides, Xenophon, and even that Isocrates whom 
Goldsmith, from the critical altitudes of the 
' Monthly Review,' recommended him to study. 
At other ' classics ' he worked with equal dili- 
gence. His ' Decameron ' — the London quarto 
of 1725 — was filled with marginalia identifying 
Boccaccio's sources of inspiration and principal 
imitators, while his Milton — the two-volume 
duodecimo of 1730-8 — was interleaved, and an- 
notated profusely with parallel passages drawn 
from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and ' the 
ancients.' He had crowded Dugdale's ' Baron- 
age ' with corrections and additions ; he had 
largely l commented ' the four folio volumes of 
Clarendon's ' Rebellion ; ' and he had followed 
everywhere, with remorseless rectifications, the 
vagrant utterances of gossiping Gilbert Burnet. 
His patience, accuracy, research, were not less 
extraordinary than his odd, out-of-the-way 
knowledge. In the 'Voyages de Bergeron' 
(quarto) that author says : ' Mango Cham fut 
noie.' No, comments Gray, decisively, ' Mun- 
caca or Mangu-Khanw was not drowned, but in 
reality slain in China at the siege of Ho-chew in 
1258.' Which of us could oblige an inquisitive 
examiner with the biography of this Eastern po- 



Grays Library. 141 

tentate 1 Which of us would not be reduced to 
' combining our information ' (like the ingenious 
writer on Chinese Metaphysics, as to 'mangoes' 
and ' great Chams ' ! 

But the two most interesting items of the Cat- 
alogue are yet unmentioned. One is the labo- 
rious collection of Manuscript Music that Gray 
compiled in Italy while frivolous Horace Walpole 
was eating iced fruits in a domino to the sound 
of a guitar. Zamperelli, Pergolesi, Arrigoni, 
Galuppi — he has ransacked them all, noting the 
school of the composer and the source of the 
piece selected — copying out religiously even the 
1 Regole per l'Accompagnamento.' The other, 
which we who write have seen, is the famous 
Linnaeus exhibited at Cambridge in 1885 by Mr. 
Ruskin. It is an interleaved copy of the ' Sys- 
tema Naturae,' two volumes in three, covered 
as to their margins and added pages with won- 
derful minute notes in Latin, and illustrated by 
Gray himself with delicately finished pen-and-ink 
drawings of birds and insects. During the later 
part of his life these volumes, we are told, were 
continually on his table, and his absorbing love 
for natural history is everywhere manifested in 
his journals and pocket-books. When he is in 
the country, he classes the plants ; when in town, 
he notes the skins of birds in shops ; and when 



142 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

he eats whitebait at Greenwich, he straightway 
describes that dainty in the language of Tacitus. 
Nullus odor nisiPiscis ; farind respersus, frixusque 
editur. 

Among the manuscripts proper of this collec- 
tion, the place of honour belongs to one which 
Mason had labelled ' Original Copy of the Elegy 
in a Country Church- Yard.' In addition to other 
variations from the printed text, erased words in 
this MS. showed that Cato stood originally for 
Hampden, and Tully and Caesar for Milton and 
Cromwell : 

' Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest, 
Some Caesar guiltless of his country's blood/ 

Here, too, were found those well-known but re- 
jected ' additional ' stanzas : 

* The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow, 
Exalt the brave, and idolize Success ; 
But more to Innocence their Safety owe 
Than Pow'r and Genius e'er conspir'd to bless. 

'And thou, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead, 
Dost in these Notes their artless Tale relate, 
By Night and lonely Contemplation led 
To linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate : 

' Hark ! how the sacred Calm that broods around, 
Bids ev'ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease ; 
In still small Accents whisp'ring from the Ground, 
A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace. 



Gray's Library. 143 

' No more, with Reason and thyself at Strife, 

Give anxious Cares and endless Wishes room ; 
But thro' the cool sequester 'd Vale of Life 
Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.' 1 

Another group of autographs in this volume 
had a special interest. The first was the note- 
let, or ' spell/ which Lady Schaub and Miss 
Speed left for Gray upon that first call when the 
nervous poet was ' not at home ' to his unex- 
pected visitors. Next to this came the poem 
which the note elicited — that charming ' Long 
Story, 1 with its echo of Matthew Prior, which has 
set their tune to so many later verse-spinners : 

' His bushy beard, and shoe-strings green, 
His high-crown'd hat, and sattin-doublet, 
Mov'd the stout heart of England's Queen, 
Tho' Pope and Spaniard could not trouble it.' 

Or again : 

' Who prowl'd the country far and near, 
Bewitch'd the children of the peasants, 
Dried up the cows, and lam'd the deer, 

And suck'd the eggs, and kill'd the pheasants.' 

1 Another additional stanza, perhaps better known than 
the above, does not occur in the 'Original Copy' of the 
Elegy, but in a later MS. at Pembroke College : — 

' There scatter' d oft, the earliest of the Year, 
By Hands unseen, are Show'rs of Violets found : 
The Red-breast loves to build, & warble there, 
And little Footsteps lightly print the Ground.' 



144 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Does not one seem to catch in this the coming 
cadences of another haunter of the ' Poets' Walk ' 
at Eton — of Winthrop Mackworth Praed ; nay, 
an it be not Use majeste, even of the lighter 
strains of the Laureate himself ! To the ' Long 
Story' followed Miss Speed's polite little ac- 
knowledgment with its invitation to dinner, and 
a few pages further on the verses beginning — 

' Midst Beauty and Pleasure's gay Triumphs to languish/ 

which Gray probably wrote for her — verses in 
which there is more of poetic ardour than genu- 
ine passion. Gray was not a marrying man. 
Yet one feels half sorry that he was never united 
to ' Your oblig'd & obedient Henrietta Jane 
Speed,' with her £30,000, her house in town, 
and her ' china and old japan infinite.' Still 
more to be resented is the freak of Fate which 
transformed the delightful Melissa of the ' Long 
Story ' into the berouged French Baronne who, 
sixteen years later, in company with her lap- 
dogs, piping bullfinch, and cockatoo, arrived 
from the Hague as Madame de la Perriere, and 
' Ministress at London.' 

The large quarto volume containing the above 
poems also included the first sketch in red crayon 
of Gray's unfinished Latin Poem, ' De Princi" 
piis Cogitandi,' and a copy of the translation of 



Gray's Library. 145 

the Ugolino episode from the ' Inferno/ first 
printed by Mr. Gosse in 1884. Of the volumes 
of miscellaneous MSS. (where was to be found 
the * Dialogue of Books ') it is impossible to 
speak here. But among the rest comes a copy 
of the ' Strawberry Hill ' edition of the ' Odes 
by Mr. Gray* — those Odes which at first he 
had so obstinately refused to annotate. * If a 
thing cannot be understood without notes,' he 
told Walpole. ' it had better not be understood 
at all.' He must, however, have subsequently 
recanted, since th's copy is filled with carefully 
written explanations of the allusions, and with 
indications of the sources of information. . This 
book and the Note-Books of Travel and Read- 
ing, with their methodical arrangement, their 
scrupulous accuracy, their unwearied pains, all 
help us to understand that leisurely fastidious- 
ness, that hesitating dilettanteism, that endless 
preluding to unachieved performance, which 
make of the most literary, exact, and polished of 
poets, at the same time the least copious of 
writers. In his bust in the hall of Pembroke 
College, Mr. Hamo Thornycroft has happily 
succeeded in accentuating these qualities of re- 
finement and intellectual precision. For the 
rest, is not Gray wholly contained in the vignette 
of Rogers to Mitford > Gray, he says, saw little 

10 



146 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

society in London. He had 'a nice dinner 
from the Tavern brought to his lodgings, a glass 
or two of sweet wine, and [here is a delightful 
touch !] as he sippd it talked about great Peo- 
ple.' It needs but to fill the room with those 
scarlet martagon-lilies and double stocks for 
which he trudged daily to Covent Garden, to 
spread a meteorological register upon the writ- 
ing-table, to open Gavin Douglas his ' Palice of 
Honour' in the window-seat — and the picture 
is finished. 



THE NEW CHESTERFIELD. 

T ORD CHESTERFIELD detested prov- 
- L/ erbs. For him they were not so much the 
wit of one man and the wisdom of many, as the 
cheap rhetoric of the vulgar, to which no person 
of condition could possibly condescend. Yet 
it is his Lordship's misfortune to suggest one of 
the homeliest. Nothing so well describes the 
state of his modern reputation as the familiar 
adage, ; Give a dog a bad name, and hang him/ 
Dr. Johnson, who had more or less valid rea- 
sons for antagonism, characterized the famous 
letters in one of those vigorous verdicts, the 
compactness of which has sometimes been al- 
lowed to condone injustice. They taught, he 
declared, ' the morals of a courtesan, 1 and the 
manners of a dancing-master.' Cowper fol- 
lowed suit. Addressing the author in the ' Pro- 
gress of Error ' as Petronius, he informed him 
that the tears of the Muses would ' scald his 
memory ; ' and after apostrophizing him as a 

1 Modern usage here requires the alteration of a word. 



148 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

' graybeard corrupter of our listening youth/ 
and a ' polisbTd and high-finish'd foe to Truth,' 
adjured him finally (and rather fatuously) to 
send from the shades some message of recanta- 
tion, — in all of which there is more of poetic 
phraseology than energy of reproach. With the 
novelists Lord Chesterfield has hardly fared 
better. Dickens, who drew upon him for Sir 
John Chester in ' Barnaby Rudge,' makes that 
personage declare enthusiastically that ' in every 
page of this enlightened writer, he finds some 
captivating hypocrisy which had never occurred 
to him before, or some superlative piece of self- 
ishness to which he was utterly a stranger.' 
The picture in Thackeray's ' Virginians ' is 
quieter and more lifelike. We are shown Lord 
Chesterfield at Tunbridge, when Harry War- 
rington makes his ddbut there — ' a little beetle- 
browed, hook-nosed, high-shouldered gentle- 
man,' much like his portrait by Gainsborough, 
sitting over his wine at the White Horse with 
M. de Pollnitz, rallying and ironically compli- 
menting that ambiguous adventurer, making 
magnificent apology to Mr. Warrington when 
he has unwittingly insulted him, and, at a later 
period, with his customary composure, losing 
six hundred pounds to him at cards. As to this 
last detail there may be doubts. Thackeray 



The New Chesterfield. 149 

probably counted upon human frailty and the 
inveteracy of an ancient habit, but Lord Car- 
narvon says that Lord Chesterfield gave up play 
when he accepted office, and he had been Am- 
bassador at the Hague and Viceroy in Ireland 
years before he met Colonel Esmond's grandson 
at M. Barbeau's much-frequented ordinary in 
the Wells. 

Turning to the two quarto volumes which, in 
March, 1774, were sent forth from Golden Square 
by that not entirely discreet and certainly rapa- 
cious representative, his Lordship's daughter- 
in-law, one's first impression is that they have 
been more talked about in the light of Johnson's 
epigram than read by that of their own merits. 
No one, of course, would affirm, even allowing 
for the corrupt state of the society in which they 
were written, that their moral tone, in one re- 
spect especially, is defensible ; nor can it be 
denied., even supposing them to emanate from a 
friend rather than a parent, that they contain 
passages which, to our modern taste, are more 
than unpleasant. But without in the least at- 
tempting to extenuate these objectionable feat- 
ures of the correspondence, it is but just to its 
author to remember that it was never intended 
either for the public instruction or for the public 
eye. When Mrs. Eugenia Stanhope trusted the 



150 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

letters would be of use ' to the Youth of these 
Kingdoms,' she was palpably overlooking this 
obvious fact. If Lord Chesterfield had pub- 
lished them himself, he would no doubt have 
considerably edited them ; but it is extremely 
unlikely that he would ever have published them 
at all. The precepts which he desired to instil 
into Philip Stanhope were the precepts of the 
society in which Philip Stanhope was moving — 
the principles of his patron, Lord Albemarle, and 
his preceptress, Lady Hervey. They were in- 
tended not for the world at large, but for the 
narrower world of fashion. 

The systematic dissimulation which they ap- 
pear to inculcate has also been urged against 
them. But here again it seems to have been 
forgotten that young Stanhope was intended 
for a politician and statesman, — that what his 
father most desired for him was the successes of 
a court and the rewards of diplomacy. After all, 
the volto sciolto and pensieri stretti, the ' looks 
loose ' and ' thoughts close, 1 x which he so per- 
sistently enjoins, are no more than the unim- 
peachable Sir Henry Wotton impressed upon 
the equally unimpeachable John Milton. Lord 

1 A more popular rendering of this useful maxim is the 
' heyes hopen and mouth shut ' of Thomas the footman 
in ' The Newcomes,' ch. xlvii. 



The New Chesterfield. 151 

Chesterfield puts his points coldly and cyni- 
cally ; but by his excellent sermon on the 
suaviter in mo do and the fortiter in re, he 
preaches in reality little beyond that necessary 
conciliation of the feelings of others which is 
inculcated by almost every manual of ethics. 
Again, if he harps somewhat wearisomely upon 
* les manieres, les biensiances, les agrdmens, it is 
precisely because these were the weak points of 
his pupil, who, master at twenty of Latin, Greek, 
and political history, speaking readily German, 
French, and Italian, having a remarkable mem- 
ory and a laudable curiosity, still retained an 
awkwardness of address which neither Marcel 
nor Desnoyers could wholly overcome, 1 and a 
defective enunciation which would have resisted 
all the pebbles of Demosthenes. For the rest, 
Lord Chesterfield's teaching is, in great measure, 
unexceptional. Its worst fault, in addition to 
those already mentioned, is that it too frequently 
confuses being with seeming, and the assump- 
tion of a virtue with the actual possession of it. 
But many of its injunctions are irreproachable, 
and even admirable as aphorisms ; and those to 
whom their note of worldly wisdom is distasteful 
must blame not so much the writer, as Horace 

1 Desnoyers was the fashionable English dancing- 
master ; Marcel the French one. 



152 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

and Cicero, Bolingbroke and La Bruyere, De 
Retz and La Rochefoucault, from whom he had 
compiled his rules for conduct, and shaped his 
scheme of life. 

When Philip Stanhope died at six and thirty, 
neither ' paitri [sic] de graces ' as Lord Chester- 
field hoped, nor particularly distinguished in 
statecraft (he was simply Envoy at Dresden), 
it was discovered that he had so far adopted the 
policy of pensieri stretti as to have been married 
privately for some years. Probably the shock 
of this discovery was softened to his father (who 
nevertheless behaved liberally to the widow) 
by the fact that, in the failure of his plans for 
his son, he had already begun to interest him- 
self in the training of another member of his 
family, a little boy who was destined to be his 
successor in the earldom. Seven years before 
Philip Stanhope's death he had opened a new 
series of letters with a godchild, also Philip 
Stanhope, and the son of Mr. Arthur Stanhope, 
of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire. Beginning 
when the boy was five and a half, the corre- 
spondence was continued for nine years, follow- 
ing him from ' Mr. Robert's Boarding School in 
Marybone by London ' to the house in South- 
ampton Row of his tutor, the notorious Dr. 
Dodd. When the first letter was written, Lord 



The New Chesterfield. 153 

Chesterfield was sixty-seven, and the last was 
penned only three years before his death. This 
is the collection which, after being mislaid for a 
long period, was published in 1889 by the late 
Lord Carnarvon, to whom it had been presented 
by his father-in-law, the sixth Earl of Chester- 
field. It contributes not a little to the revision 
of the popular idea formed of the writer, — an 
idea, it may be added, which, upon re-exami- 
nation of the earlier correspondence, had already 
been considerably modified by such critics as 
Mr. Abraham Hayward and M. Sainte-Beuve. 
Superficially, the letters resemble their prede- 
cessors, and the outline of education is much 
the same. Little Philip was to be ' perfectly 
master ' of that French which his godfather loved 
so dearly, and in which he wrote so often and 
so well ; he was to be thoroughly grounded in 
History, Geography, Dancing, Italian, German ; 
he was to be proficient in Greek and Latin, 
and he was to complete his studies in the ' well- 
regulated republic ' of Geneva, the salutary 
austerity of which was then usefully tempered 
by the presence of Voltaire and the French 
refugees. Many of the new letters reproduce 
the old precepts ; there are even similarities of 
thought and phraseology ; and though the volto 
sciolto is not obtruded, the suaviter in modo 



154 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

is still persistently advocated. But age has 
brought its softening influences — the moral tone 
is ostensibly higher, and the old worldly savoir- 
faire has lost much of its ancient cynicism. 
Some of the axioms which Lord Carnarvon 
quotes are remarkable for their accent of ear- 
nestness ; others, as he observes, are ' almost 
theological ' in tone. Saint Augustine, for ex- 
ample, could hardly say more than this : * Si je 
pouvois emp£cher qu'il n'y eut un seul mal- 
heureux sur la Terre, j'y sacrirlerois avec plaisir 
mon bien, mes soins, et meme ma sante. C'est 
le grand devoir de Thomme, surtout de l'homme 
chretien.' The next is nearer to the elder 
manner : ' Ayez une grande Charite" pour 
Tamour de Dieu et une extreme politesse pour 
l'amour de vous meme.' And here is a graver 
utterance than either : ' God has been so good 
as to write in all our hearts the duty that he ex- 
pects from us, which is adoration and thanks- 
giving and doing all the good we can to our 
fellow creatures/ 

It is extraordinary to note what an infinity of 
trouble Lord Chesterfield took to arouse and 
amuse his little pupil. Sometimes the letter is 
an anecdote, biographical or historical ; some- 
times a cunningly contrived French vocabulary, 
one of which, inter alia, comprehensively defines 



The New Chesterfield. 155 

' Les Graces' as ' Something gracefully genteel, 
and engaging in the air and figure.' Others (like 
the admirable papers in ' The World ') denounce 
the prevailing vice of drunkenness. ' Fuyez le 
vin, car c'est un poison lent, mais sur.' Occa- 
sionally a little diagram aids the exposition, as 
when a rude circle, with a tiny figure at top, 
stands for ' le petit Stanhope ' and ' ses anti- 
podes ; ' in other cases, the course of instruction 
in politeness and public speaking is diversified 
by definitions of similes and metaphors, epigrams, 
anagrams, and logogriphes. Finally, there is a 
complete treatise, in fourteen epistles, on the 
' Art of Pleasing,' from which we extract the 
following on wit and satire : 

'When wit exerts itself in satyr it is a most 
malignant distemper ; wit it is true may be 
shown in satyr, but satyr does not constitute 
wit, as most fools imagine it does. A man of 
real wit will find a thousand better occasions of 
showing it. Abstain therefore most carefully 
from satyr, which though it fall upon no particu- 
lar person in company, and momentarily from 
the malignity of the human heart, pleases all ; 
upon reflexion it frightens all too, they think it 
may be their turn next, and will hate you for 
what they find you could say of them more, 
than be obliged to you for what you do not 



156 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

say. Fear and hatred are next door neighbours. 
The more wit you have the more good nature 
and politeness you must show, to induce people 
to pardon your superiority, for that is no easy 
matter.' 

Alas ! and alas 1 that so much labour and 
patience should have been lost. For Philip the 
Second, though he made no secret marriage, was 
not a much greater success than Philip the First. 
He turned out a commonplace country-gentle- 
man, amiable, methodical, agricultural, but 
wholly overshadowed and obliterated by the 
fame of the accomplished statesman and orator 
who had directed his studies. 

' The bows of eloquence are buried with the 
Archers.' It is impossible, even with the aid of 
the phonograph, to recapture the magnetic per- 
sonality, the fervour of gesture that winged the 
words and carried conviction to the hearer. 
Equally impossible is it, in this age of egotisms 
and eccentricities that pass for character, to 
realize the fascination of those splendid manners 
for which Lord Chesterfield was celebrated. 
The finished elegance, the watchful urbanity, 
the perfect ease and self-possession, which 
Fielding commended, and Johnson could not 
contest, are things too foreign to our rest- 
less over-consciousness to be easily intelligible. 



The New Chesterfield. 157 

But we can at least call up — not without com- 
passionate admiration — the pathetic picture of 
the deaf old gentleman who had been the rival 
of ' silver-tongued Murray' and the correspond- 
ent of Montesquieu, sitting down at seventy in 
his solitary study at Babiole 1 to write, in that 
wonderful hand of which Lord Carnarvon gives 
a facsimile, his periodical letter of advice to a 
petit bout d'homme at Parson Dodd's in South- 
ampton Row, concerning whose career in life 
he had formed the fondest — and the vainest — 
expectations. 

1 Babiole was His Lordship's country-house at Black- 
heath, so christened in imitation of Bagatelle, the seat near 
Paris of his friend Madame la Marquise de Monconseil. 



A DAY AT STRAWBERRY HILL. 

r T y O the rigorous exactitudes of modern realism 
it may seem an almost hopeless task to 
revive the details of a day in a Twickenham 
Villa when George the Third was King. And 
yet, with the aid of Horace Walpole's letters, of 
the ' Walpoliana ' of Pinkerton, and, above all, 
of the catalogue of Strawberry Hill printed by its 
owner in 1774, there is no insurmountable diffi- 
culty in deciding what must probably have been 
the customary course of events. Nothing is 
needed at the outset but to assume that you had 
arrived, late on the previous night, at the em- 
battled Gothic building on the Teddington 
Road, and that the fatigues of your journey 
had left you little more than a vague notion of 
your host, and a fixed idea that the breakfast 
hour was nine. Then, after carrying with you 
into the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber 
an indistinct recollection of Richardson's draw- 
ings of Pope and his mother, and of Berming- 
ham's ' owl cut in paper,' which you dimly make 



A Day at Strawberry Hill. 159 

out with your candle on the walls, you would be 
waked at eight next morning by Colomb, the 
Swiss valet (as great a tyrant over his master 
as his compatriot Canton in the ' Clandestine 
Marriage '), and in due time would repair to the 
blue-papered and blue-furnished Breakfast Room, 
looking pleasantly on the Thames. Here, coast- 
ing leisurely round the apartment, you would 
probably pause before M. de Carmontel's 
double picture of your host's dead friend, 
Madame du Deffand, and her relative the 
Duchesse de Choiseul, or you would peer 
curiously at the view of Madame de Sevigne's 
hotel in the ' Rue Coulture St. Catherine.' 
Presently would come a patter of tiny feet, and 
a fat, and not very sociable, little dog, which had 
once belonged to the said Madame du Deffand, 
would precede its master, whom you would hear 
walking, with the stiff tread of an infirm person, 
from his bedroom on the floor above. Shortly 
afterwards would enter a tall, slim, frail-looking 
figure in a morning-gown, with a high, pallid 
forehead, dark brilliant eyes under drooping 
lids, and a friendly, but forced and rather unpre- 
possessing smile. Tonton (as the little dog was 
called), after being cajoled into a semblance of 
cordiality, would be lifted upon a small sofa at 
his master's side, the tea-kettle and heater 



160 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

would arrive, and tea would be served in cups 
of fine old white embossed Japanese china. 
And then, the customary salutations exchanged 
and over, would gradually begin, in a slightly 
affected fashion, to which you speedily grow 
accustomed, that wonderful flow of talk which 
(like Praed's Vicar's) 

' Slipped from politics to puns, 

And passed from Mahomet to Moses,' — 

that endless stream of admirably told stories, of 
recollections graphic and humorous, of sallies 
and bon mots, of which Horace Walpole's ex- 
traordinary correspondence is the cooled expres- 
sion, but of the vivacity and variety of which, 
enhanced as they were by the changes in the 
speaker's voice and look, and emphasized by 
his semi-French gesticulation, it is impossible 
to give any adequate idea. A glance across the 
river would suggest an anecdote of her Grace 
the Duchess of Queensberry ; a falling spoon, a 
mot of Lady Townshend. Upon yesterday's 
execution at Tyburn would follow a vivid pict- 
ure of the deaths of Balmerino and Kilmarnock ; 
or a reference to your ride from London of the 
night before, would usher in a full and particu- 
lar account how the voluble and fascinating 
gentleman before you, with the great chalk 



A Day at Strawberry Hill. 161 

stones in his fingers, was once all but shot 
through the head by the highwayman James 
Maclean. 

Breakfast over, and a liberal bowl of bread- 
and-milk tossed out of window to the troops of 
squirrels that come flocking in from the high 
trees round the lawn, your host would invite 
you to make the tour of the grounds, adding (if 
it were May) that his favourite lilacs were well 
worth the effort. He would astonish you by 
going out in his slippers and without a hat; and, 
in reply to your ill-concealed astonishment, 
would laughingly compare himself to the Indian 
in the 'Spectator 1 who said he was 'all face.' 
Passing by the Abbot's garden, with its bright 
parterres, he would lead you to the pretty cot- 
tage he had built on the site of the old resi- 
dence of his deceased tenant Richard Franklin, 
once printer of that scurrilous ' Craftsman ' in 
which Pulteney and Bolingbroke had so persist- 
ently assailed his father. In its sunny, print- 
hung tea-room, with the ' Little Library ' at the 
side, he would show you the picture of his friend 
Lady Hervey, once the ' beautiful Molly Lepel ' 
of Chesterfield's ballad, and would tell you that 
the frame was carved by the same Grinling Gib- 
bons to whom we owe the bronze statue of 
King James the Second in the Privy Garden 

ii 



1 62 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

at Whitehall. Thence you would pass to the 
chapel in the wood, with its stained-glass pict- 
ures of Henry the Third and his Queen from 
Bexhill Church, and its shrine from Santa Maria 
Maggiore at Rome ; and he would explain that 
the roof was designed by that unimpeachable 
authority in Gothic, Mr. Chute of the Vyne, in 
Hampshire ; that George Augustus Selwyn had 
given him the great earthen pot at the door ; 
and that the carved bench in the ante-chapel 
had been contrived by no less a person than 
the son of the famous ' Ricardus Aristarchus,' 
Master of Trinity, the — 

1 mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains 
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains — ' 

as he would quote from the ' Dunciad ' of the 
late lamented Mr. Pope. Richard Bentley the 
younger, he would remind you, had also drawn 
some excellent illustrations to Gray (the originals 
of which he will show you later in the library); 
and meanwhile he invites your attention at the 
end of the winding walk to another masterpiece 
from the same ingenious brain — a huge oaken 
seat shaped like a shell, in which once sat to- 
gether three of the handsomest women in Eng- 
land, — the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess 
of Richmond, and the Countess of Ailesbury. 
If you were still intelligently interested, and 



A Day at Strawberry Hill. 163 

your host still unfatigued (for he is capricious 
and easily tired), you would pass from the garden 
to the private printing-press, the ' Officina Ar- 
buteana ' as he christens it, next the neighbour- 
ing farmyard. Here you would be introduced 
to the superintendent and occasional secretary, 
Mr. Thomas Kirgate, who, if so minded, would 
exhibit to you a proof of Miss Hannah More's 
poem of 'Bishop Bonner's Ghost' (which his 
patron is kindly setting up for her), or then and 
there strike you off a piping-hot ' pull ' of the 
latest quatrain to those charming Miss Berrys 
who are now inhabiting ' Little Strawberry ' hard 
by, once tenanted by red-faced, good-humoured 
Mrs. Clive. As you return at last to the house, 
your guide would almost certainly pause in the 
Little Cloister at the entrance beside the blue 
and white china tub for goldfish in which was 
drowned that favourite cat whose fate was im- 
mortalized by Gray; and, lifting the label, he 
would read the poet's words : 

' 'T was on this lofty Vase's side, 
Where China's gayest Art has dy'd 

The azure Flow'rs, that blow, 
Demurest of the tabby kind, 
The pensive Selima reclin'd, 
Gaz'd on the Lake below.' 1 

1 There is one of these labels in the Dyce Collection at 
South Kensington. 



1 64 Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 

Once more under Bentley's japanned tin lan- 
tern in the gloomy little hall, your host, pending 
the scribbling of half-a-dozen pressing letters to 
Lady Ossory, Mr. Pinkerton, or one or other 
of his many correspondents, would beg you to 
await him in the Picture Gallery. Here, long 
before you had exhausted your admiration of the 
Emperor Vespasian in basalt, or the incompara- 
ble Greek Eagle from the baths of Caracalla, he 
would resume his post of cicerone, leading you 
almost at once to the portraits of his three beau- 
tiful nieces, Edward Walpole's daughters, one 
of whom, painted by Reynolds, had been for- 
tunate enough to marry King George's own 
brother, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (a 
fact of which her uncle Horace is ill-disguisedly 
proud). From the Gallery you would pass to 
the Round Drawing-Room, whose chief glory 
was Vasari's ' Bianca Capello ; ' and thence to 
the adjoining Tribune, a curious yellow-lit cham- 
ber, with semicircular recesses, in which were 
accumulated most of the choicest treasures of 
Strawberry, — miniatures by Cooper and the Oli- 
vers, enamels by Petitot and Zincke, gems from 
Italy, bas-reliefs in ivory, coins and seal-rings 
and reliquaries and filigree work, in the dis- 
persed profusion of which you would afterwards 
dimly recall such items as a silver bell carved 



A Day at Strawberry Hill. 165 

with masks and insects by Benvenuto Cellini, a 
missal illuminated by Raphael, a bronze Caligula 
with silver eyes, and a white snuff-box with a 
portrait purporting to be a gift from Madame de 
Se'vigne' in the Elysian Fields, but sent in real- 
ity by the faithful Madame du Deffand. Each 
object would bring its train of associations and 
traditions ; and the fading of the ' all-golden af- 
ternoon ' would find your companion still prom- 
ising fresh marvels in the yet unexplored rooms 
beyond, where are the speculum of cannel coal 
once used by the notorious starmonger, Dr. 
John Dee ; the red hat of his Eminence Cardi- 
nal Wolsey ; and the very spurs worn by King 
William the Third, of immortal memory, at the 
ever-glorious Battle of the Boyne. 

With four o'clock would come dinner, eaten 
probably in the Refectory, a room consecrated 
chiefly to the family portraits, conspicuous among 
which, in blue velvet, was your host by Rich- 
ardson. The repast was ' of Attic taste,' but 
with very little wine, as Walpole himself drank 
nothing but iced water, and ' coffee upstairs ' 
was ordered with such promptitude as to afford 
the visitor but scanty leisure for lingering over 
the bottle. About five you migrated to the 
Round Drawing-Room, where your entertainer, 
after recommending you to replenish your box 



1 66 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

with Fribourg's snuff from a canister of which 
the hiding-place was an ancient marble urn in 
the window-seat, would take up his station 
on the sofa, and resume his inexhaustible flood 
of memories and reflections, always bright, often 
striking, and never wearisome. Once, perhaps, 
he would rise to exhibit the closet he had built 
for Lady Di. Beauclerk's seven drawings in 
soot-water to his own tragedy of the ' Mysteri- 
ous Mother ; ' or he would adjourn for an hour 
to the Library, to turn over his unrivalled col- 
lection of Hogarth's prints; or to show you 
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's ' Milton,' or 
the identical ' Iliad' and ' Odyssey' from which 
Pope made his translations, or the long row of 
books printed at the ' Officina Arbuteana.' But 
he would gravitate sooner or later to his old 
vantage-ground on the sofa, whence, unhasting, 
unresting, he would discourse most excellent 
anecdote into the small hours, when the chintz 
curtains of the Red Bedchamber would again 
receive his bewitched and bewildered, but still 
unsatiated, visitor. And so would end your 
day at Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle of Straw- 
berry Hill. 



GOLDSMITH'S LIBRARY. 

AN auctioneer's catalogue — and particularly 
■^** an auctioneer's catalogue more than a 
hundred years old — is not, at first sight, the 
most suggestive of subjects. And yet that 
issued in July, 1774, by Mr. Good, of 121 
Fleet Street, still possesses considerable inter- 
est. For it is nothing less than an account, bald, 
indeed, and only moderately literary, of the 
1 Houshold [sic] Furniture, with the Select Col- 
lection of Scarce, Curious and Valuable Books, 
in English, Latin, Greek, French, Italian and 
other Languages, late the Library of Dr. 
Goldsmith, Deceased.' As one runs over the 
items, one seems to realize the circumstances. 
One seems almost to see Mr. Good's unemo- 
tional assistants, with their pens behind their 
ears, and their ink-bottles ' upon the excise prin- 
ciple' dangling from their button-holes, as they 
peer about the dingy Chambers at Brick Court, 
with the dark little closet of a bedroom at the 
back where the poor Doctor lay and died. We 
can imagine them sniffing superciliously at the 
chief pictorial adornment, 'The Tragic Muse, 



1 68 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

in a gold frame ; ' or drawing from its sheath, 
with an air of 'prentice connoisseurship, ' the 
steel-hilted sword, inlaid with gold,' or ' the 
black-hilted ditto,' not without speculations as 
to how those weapons would adorn their own 
ungainly persons in a holiday jaunt to White 
Conduit House or Marybone Gardens. We 
see them professionally prodding the faded ma- 
hogany sofa ' covered with blue morine ' which 
had so often vibrated under the nervous twitch- 
ings of Johnson ; appraising the ' compass card- 
tables ' over which Boswell had dealt trumps to 
Reynolds ; or critically weighing the teapot 
in which the 'Jessamy Bride 1 had more than 
once made tea. Their sordid commercial figures 
must have crossed and re-crossed before ' the 
very large dressing-glass' with ' mahogany 
frame,' which only a few weeks past had re- 
flected the ' blue velvet,' and the ' straw- 
coloured ' and ' silver-grey tamboured waist- 
coats ' for which honest Mr. William Filby, at 
the sign of the Harrow in Water Lane, was 
never now to see the money. No doubt, too, 
they desecrated, with their Fleet Street mud, 
that famous Wilton carpet which had looked so 
sumptuous when it was first laid down but half 
a dozen years ago ; and, if they were at all like 
their brethren of these days, they must have 



Goldsmith's Library. 169 

pished generally over the rest of those modest 
properties which, in the golden epoch when the 
'Good Natur'd Man' seemed to promise per- 
petual prosperity, had excited so much awe and 
admiration among Goldsmith's humbler friends. 
'Not much to tot up here, Docket!' — says 
Mr. Good's young man to his fellow. And 
we may fancy Mr. Docket assenting with a 
contemptuous extension of his under lip, en- 
forced by the supplementary proposition that 
they should at once moisten their unpromising 
labours by adjourning to a pot of Parsons' En- 
tire at the Tavern by the Temple Gates. 

As for the books, the ' Select Collection ■ 
that the unsympathetic stock-takers turned over 
so irreverently with their feet as they lay in dusty 
ranges on the floor, it must be feared that 
worthy Mr. Good's description of them as 
1 scarce, curious, and valuable ' is more credit- 
able to his business traditions than his literary 
insight. Goldsmith was scarcely a book-lover 
in the sense in which that term is now used. 
The man who, as Hawkins relates, could tear 
half a dozen leaves out of a volume to save him- 
self the trouble of transcription, — the man who 
underscored objectionable passages with his 
thumb-nail, as he once did to a new poem that 
belonged to Reynolds — was not a genuine 



170 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

amateur du llvre. They were a ' speculative 
lot ' in all probability, the ' Brick Court Li- 
brary ; ' and no doubt bore about them visibly 
the bumps and bruises of their transit ' in two 
returned post chaises ' to the remote farm at 
Hyde, where their owner laboured at his vast 
1 Animated Nature.' Many of them had mani- 
festly been collected to that end. Hill's 
4 Fossils,' 1748 ; Pliny's ' Historia Naturalis,' 
1752 ; Gessner and Aldrovandus ' De Quadru- 
pedibus ; ' Gouan's ' Histoire des Poissons,' 
1770 ; Bokadsch's ' De Animalibus Marinis,' 
1761 ; De Geer's ' Histoire des Insectes,' 
1 77 1, must all plainly have belonged to that 
series of purchases for the nonce which, he 
says in his preface, had so severely taxed his 
overburdened resources. In the classics he 
was fairly well equipped ; and, as might be 
expected, he had many of the British poets, 
not to mention two copies of that indispen- 
sable manual, Mr. Edward Bysshe, his treatise 
of the rhyming art. But it is in French liter- 
ature generally, and in French minstrels and 
playwrights in particular, that his store "rs 
richest. He has the ' Encyclopedic,' the 
' Dictionnaire ' and ' Recueil d'Anecdotes,' the 
' Dictionnaire Litteraire, ' the ' Dictionnaire Cri- 
tique, Pittoresque et Sentencieux,' the ' Die- 



Goldsmith's Library. 171 

tionnaire Gentilhomme ; ' he has many of the 
ana — ' Parrhasiana,' ' Ducatiana,' ' Naudeana,' 
' Patiniana,' although, oddly enough, there is 
no copy of the ' Menagiana,' which not only 
supplied him with that ancient ballad of ' Mon- 
sieur de la Palice ' out of which grew ' Madam 
Blaize,' but also with the little poem of Bernard 
de la Monnoye, which he paraphrased so 
brightly in the well-known stanzas beginning : 

' Say, cruel Iris, pretty rake, 
Dear mercenary beauty, 
What annual offering shall I make, 
Expressive of my duty ? ' 

He has the works of Voltaire, Diderot, 
Fontenelle, Marmontel, Voiture ; he has the 
plays of Brueys, La Chaussee, Dancourt, 
Destouches ; he has many of the madrigalists 
and minor versemen, — all of which possessions 
tend to corroborate that suspected close study 
of Gallic authors from which, as many hold, 
he derived not a little of the unfailing perspi- 
cuity of his prose, and most of the brightness 
and vivacity of his more familiar verse. Of 
his own works — and the fact is curious when 
one remembers some of his traditional charac- 
teristics — there are practically no examples, at 
least there are none catalogued. Their sole 



172 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

representative is an imperfect set of the ' His- 
tory of the Earth and Animated Nature, 1 which 
had only recently been completed, and was 
published posthumously. Not a single copy of 
' The Vicar,' of ' She Stoops to Conquer,' of 
'The Citizen of the World,' of 'The Deserted 
Village ' 1 Not even a copy of that rarest of 
rarities, the privately printed version of ' Edwin 
and Angelina,' which its author told his friend 
Cradock ' could not be amended ' — although 
he was always amending it 1 Of course it is 
possible that his own writings had been with- 
drawn from Mr. Good's catalogue, or that they 
are included in the ' and others ' of unspecified 
lots. But this is scarcely likely, and it may be 
accepted as a noteworthy fact that one of the 
most popular authors of his day did not, at his 
death, possess any of his own performances, 
with the exception of an incomplete specimen of 
his most laborious compilation. 1 Besides this, 
the only volumes that bear indirectly upon his 
work are the ' Memoirs ' of the Cardinal de 
Retz, which he had used in ' The Bee,' the 
' Lettres Persanes' of Montesquieu, which 
perhaps prompted ' The Citizen of the World,' 

1 Racine was in similar case. In the recently discov- 
ered inventory of his effects, there is not a single copy of 
his works. 



Goldsmith's Library, 173 

and the 'Roman Comique ' of M. Paul Scar- 
ron, which he had been translating in the latter 
months of his life — an accident which has 
left its mark in his last poem, the admirable 
1 Retaliation ' : 

' Of old, when Scarron his companions invited, 
Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united/ 

It may be that he had intended to prefix a bio- 
graphical sketch or memoir to his version of the 
' Comic Romance,' since the reference here is 
plainly to those famous picnic suppers in the 
Marais, to which, according to Scarron's most 
recent biographer, M. Charles Baumet, came as 
guests, but ' chacun apportant son plat/ the pink 
of dames, of courtiers, and of men of letters. 

Where did they go, these books and house- 
hold goods of ' Dr. Goldsmith, deceased ' ? 
It is to be presumed that he did not boast a 
book-plate, for none, to our knowledge, has 
ever been advertised, nor is there any record 
of one in Lord de Tabley's well-known ' Hand- 
book,' so that the existing possessors of those 
precious volumes, in the absence of any auto- 
graph inscription, must entertain their treasures 
unawares. Of his miscellaneous belongings, the 
only specimens now well-known do not seem 
to have passed under the hammer of the Fleet 



174 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Street auctioneer. His favourite chair, a dark, 
hollow-seated, and somewhat penitential look- 
ing piece of furniture, is preserved at South 
Kensington, where, not long since, it was 
sketched, in company with his cane — perhaps 
the very cane that once crossed the back of 
Evans the bookseller — by Mr. Hugh Thom- 
son, the clever young Irish artist to whom we 
are indebted for the most successful of recent 
illustrated editions of the ' Vicar of Wakefield.' 
Neither chair nor cane is in the Good Catalogue, 
nor does it make any mention of the worn 
old wooden writing-desk which Sir Benjamin 
Hawes, once Under Secretary at War, pre- 
sented to Sir Henry Cole's museum. Sir Ben- 
jamin Hawes was the grandson of William 
Hav/es, the ' surgeon apothecary ' in the 
Strand, who was called in, late on that Friday 
night in March, when the poor Doctor was 
first stricken down with the illness which a 
few days later terminated fatally. William 
Hawes, a worthy and an able man, who sub- 
sequently obtained a physician's degree, and 
helped to found the Humane Society, was the 
author of the little pamphlet, now daily grow- 
ing rarer, entitled ' An Account of the late Dr. 
Goldsmith's Illness, so far as relates to the Ex- 
hibition of Dr. James's Powders, etc., 1774' 



Goldsmith's Library. 175 

[April]. He dedicated it to Burke and Rey- 
nolds ; and he published it (he says) partly to 
satisfy curiosity as to the circumstances of 
Goldsmith's death, partly to vindicate his own 
professional conduct in the matter. His narra- 
tive, in which discussion of the popular nos- 
trum upon which Goldsmith so obstinately 
relied not unnaturally occupies a considerable 
part, is too familiar for repetition ; and his re- 
marks on Goldsmith as a writer are of the sign- 
post order. But his personal testimony to the 
character of ' his late respected and ingenious 
friend ' may fitly close this paper: ' His [Gold- 
smith's] humanity and generosity greatly ex- 
ceeded the narrow limits of his fortune ; and 
those who were no judges of the literary merit 
of the Author, could not but love the Man for 
that benevolence by which he was so strongly 
characterised/ 



IN COWPER'S ARBOUR. 

A MONG its many drawbacks controversy 
^"^ has this in particular, that it sometimes 
embroils us with our closest friends. Writing 
lately of Lord Chesterfield, we found occasion 
to comment upon certain couplets which the 
poet of the ' Progress of Error ' addressed to 
his Lordship concerning his celebrated ' Let- 
ters.' What was said amounted to no more 
than that Cowper, in this instance at least, had 
not proved himself a Juvenal, — a sentiment 
which, seeing that his most modern biographer, 
Mr. Goldwin Smith, accuses him, as a satirist, 
of brandishing a whip without a lash, could 
scarcely be regarded as extravagant condemna- 
tion. Not the less, it has lain sorely upon our 
conscience. Of all the lettered figures of the 
eighteenth century, none is more dear to us 
than the gentle recluse of the sleepy little town 
by the Ouse. What I — the captivating letter- 
writer, the inventor of the immortal ' John 
Gilpin,' the delightful ' divagator ' of the ' Task ' 
and the tea-urn, the kindly proprietor of those 



In Cowper's Arbour. 177 

* canonized pets of literature/ Puss and Bess 
and Tiney — how, upon such a theme, could 
one reasonably utter things harsh or censorious ! 
It is impossible to picture him, when the cur- 
tains had fallen over those two windows that 
looked upon the three-cornered market-place at 
Olney, — his head decorated (it may be) with 
the gaily ribboned cap which had been worked 
for him by his cousin Lady Hesketh, 1 his eyes 
milder than they seem in Romney's famous 
portrait, and placidly reading the ' Public Ad- 
vertiser 1 to the click-click of Mrs. Unwin's 
stocking-needles, — without being smitten by a 
feeling of remorse. And opportunity for the 
expression of such remorse arrives pleasantly 
with an old-fashioned octavo which supplies the 
pretext for a palinode in prose. 

Its title, 'writ large, 1 is ' Cowper, Illustrated 
by a Series of Views in, or near, the Park of 
Weston-Underwood, Bucks ; ' and it is lavishly 
1 embellished ' with those mellow old plates 
which denote that steel had not yet supplanted 
copper. The artist and engraver for the most 

1 A writing-cap worn by Cowper, his watch, a seal- 
ring given to him by his cousin Theodora (his first love), 
and a ball of worsted which he wound for Mrs. Unwin, 
were among the relics exhibited in the South Gallery 
of the Guelph Exhibition of 1891. 

12 



178 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

part was one James Storer, a topographical chal- 
cographer of some repute, and a ' tall man of 
his hands ' in the days of conventional fore- 
grounds, and trees that looked like pressed-out 
patterns in seaweed. But his ' picturesque ' 
designs give us a good idea of the landscape that 
Cowper saw when he walked from Silver End 
at Olney to his friends the Throckmortons (the 
4 Mr. and Mrs. Frog ' of his letters) at Weston 
House. Here is the long bridge of ' The Task/ 

' That with its wearisome, but needful length, 
Bestrides the wintry flood ' 

between Olney and Emberton ; here, bosomed 
in its embowering trees, the little farmhouse 
called the ' Peasant's Nest. 1 Here, again, in 
the valley, and framed between the feathery 
branches of the shrubbery, is the spire of Olney 
Church, from which one may almost fancy that 

' the sound of cheerful bells 
Just undulates upon the list'ning ear ; ' 

here, standing out whitely from the yews and 
evergreens of The Wilderness, the urn with the 
epitaphs of Fop and Neptune. Further back (a 
lovely little landscape) is the clump of poplars 
by the water (not the poplars of the poem : those 
were already felled) which the poet mistook for 



In Cowper's Arbour. 179 

elms ; and here, lastly, is Cowper's own cottage 
at Weston, which, with its dormer windows, 
and its vines and jasmines, might have served as 
a model for Randolph Caldecott or Kate Green- 
away. And, behold ! ( i blest be the art that 
can immortalize! 1 ) here is Mrs. Unwin in a 
high waist entering at the gate, while Cowper 
bids her welcome from the doorway. 

Of Olney itself there are not many glimpses 
in the little volume. But the vignette on the 
titlepage shows the tiny ' boudoir ' or summer- 
house, ' not much bigger than a sedan chair,' 
which stood — nay, stands yet, — about midway 
between the red-brick house on the market- 
place and what was once John Newton's vicar- 
age. It is still, say the latest accounts, kept up 
by its present owner, and its walls and ceiling 
are covered with the autographs of pious pil- 
grims. In Storer's plate you look in at the open 
door, catching, through the window on the 
opoosite side, part of the parsonage and of the 
wall in which was constructed the gate that 
enabled Cowper at all times to communicate 
with his clerical friend. Its exact dimensions 
are given as six feet nine by five feet five ; and 
he must have been right in telling Lady Hes- 
keth that if she came to see him they should be 
1 as close-pack'd as two wax figures in an old- 



i8o Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

fashioned picture-frame/ A trap-door in the 
floor covered a receptacle in which the previous 
tenant, an apothecary, had stored his bottles ; 
and here, 'in the deep-delved earth,' one of 
Cowper's wisest counsellors, the Rev. William 
Bull of Newport Pagnell, the ' Carissimus 
Taurorum ' of the letters, the 

1 smoke-inhaling Bull, 
Always filling, never full/ 

was wont to deposit his pipes and his tobacco. 
It was in passing from the summer-house to the 
barn that Cowper encountered the viper whose 
prompt taking-off gives motive and point to that 
admirable little Musus poeticus,' — as Mr. 
Grimshawe condescendingly calls it, — the 
' Colubriad ' : 

' With outstretch'd hoe I slew him at the door, 
And taught him never to come there no more.' 

In this boudoir, or Buon Retiro, in the 
garden, Cowper must have spent his happiest 
hours. Even in the winter, when it simply 
served the humbler uses of a greenhouse, it 
prompted a poem. 

"T is a bower of Arcadian sweets, 
Where Flora is still in her prime, 
A fortress to which she retreats 

From the cruel assaults of the clime ' — 



In Cowper's Arbour. 181 

he writes in his favourite rocking-horse metre, 
and most conventional language, bidding his 
Mary remark the beauty of the pinks which it 
has preserved through the frosts. But in mid- 
July, when the floor was carpeted, and the sun 
was excluded by an awning of mats, it became 
4 the pleasantest retreat in Olney.' 'We eat, 
drink, and sleep, where we always did,' he says 
to Newton ; ' but here we spend all the rest of 
our time, and find that the sound of the wind in 
the trees, and the singing of birds, are much more 
agreeable to our ears than the incessant barking 
of dogs and screaming of children,' from both 
of which, it may be observed, they suffered 
considerably in the front of the house. Two 
years later he tells Mr. Unwin that ' our sever- 
est winter, commonly called the spring, is now 
over, and I find myself seated in my favourite 
recess, the greenhouse. In such a situation, so 
silent, so shady, where no human foot is heard, 
and where only my myrtles presume to peep in 
at the window, you may suppose I have no 
interruption to complain of, and that my thoughts 
are perfectly at my command. But the beauties 
of the spot are themselves an interruption, my 
attention being called upon by those very myrtles, 
by a double row of grass pinks, just beginning 
to blossom, and by a bed of beans already in 



1 82 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

bloom ; and you are to consider it, if you please, 
as no small proof of my regard, that, though 
you have so many powerful rivals, I disengage 
myself from them all, and devote this hour 
entirely to you.' 

Later still — a year later — he writes to New- 
ton : ' My greenhouse is never so pleasant as 
when we are just upon the point of being turned 
out of it. The gentleness of the autumnal suns, 
and the calmness of this latter season, make it 
a much more agreeable retreat than we ever 
find it in the summer ; when, the winds being 
generally brisk, we cannot cool it by admitting 
a sufficient quantity of air, without being at the 
same time incommoded by it. But now I sit 
with all the windows and the door wide open, 
and am regaled with the scent of every flower, 
in a garden as full of flowers as I have known 
how to make it. We keep no bees, but if I 
lived in a hive, I should hardly hear more of 
their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood 
resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the 
window, and pay me for the honey they get out 
of it by a hum, which, though rather monoto- 
nous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling 
of my linnets. All the sounds that Nature utters 
are delightful, at least in this country.' But he 
goes on, nevertheless, to except the braying of 



In Cowper's Arbour. 183 

an ass ; and from another letter it seems that 
the serene quietude of his bower was at times 
invaded by the noise of a quadruped of this 
kind (inimical to poets !) which belonged to a 
neighbour. 

All his summer writing was done in this con- 
tracted paradise, and not only his letters but his 
poems. ■ Never poet had a more commodious 
oratory in which to invoke his muse,' he tells 
Lady Hesketh. Here 'lived happy prisoners' 
the two goldfinches celebrated in ' The Faithful 
Bird ; ' here he wrote ' The Task,' and, accord- 
ing to Mr. Thomas Wright, of Olney, it is to 
the stimulating environment of its myrtles and 
mignonette that we owe, if not the germ, at 
least the evolution, of ' John Gilpin.' Every 
one knows how, in the current story, Lady 
Austen's diverting narrative of the way in which 
a certain citizen of the Chepe, Beyer by name, 
rode out to celebrate the anniversary of his mar- 
riage, gradually seduced her listener from the 
moody melancholy which was fast overclouding 
him ' into a loud and hearty peal of laughter.' It 
' made such an impression on his mind that at 
night he could not sleep ; and his thoughts hav- 
ing taken the form of rhyme, he sprang from 
bed, and committed them to paper, and in the 
morning brought down to Mrs. Unwin the 



1 84 Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 

crude outline of "John Gilpin." Only the out- 
line, however. But all that day and for several 
days he secluded himself in the summer-house, 
and went on with the task of polishing and im- 
proving what he had written. As he filled his 
slips of paper he sent them across the Market- 
place to Mr. Wilson, to the great delight and 
merriment of that jocular barber, who on several 
other occasions had been favoured with the first 
sight of some of Cowper's smaller poems. This 
version of the origin of "John Gilpin' 1 differs, 
we are aware, from the one generally received, 
which represents the famous ballad as having 
been commenced and finished in a night; but 
that the facts here stated are accurate we have 
the authority of Mrs. Wilson ; moreover, it has 
always been said in Olney that "John Gilpin" 
was written in the " summer-house," and that 
the first person who saw the complete poem, 
and consequently the forerunner of that noble 
army who have giggled at its drolleries, was 
William Wilson the barber. 1 1 

1 Wilson was a man of considerable intelligence, and 
a local 'character.' When in 1781 he joined the Baptists, 
he declined to dress Lady Austen's hair on Sundays. 
Consequently she was obliged to call him in on Saturday 
evenings, and once had to sit up all night to prevent the 
disarrangement of her ' head.' 



In Cowper's Arbour. 185 

Cowper has been styled by a recent editor 
the best of English letter-writers, a term which 
Scott applied to Walpole, and it has been ap- 
plied to others. Criticism loses its balance in 
these superlatives. To be the best — to use a 
schoolboy illustration — is to have the highest 
marks all round. For epistolary vigour, for vi- 
vacity, for wit, for humour, for ease, for sim- 
plicity, for subject — can you give Cowper the 
highest marks ? The answer obviously must 
be ' no.' Other writers excel him in subject, 
in wit, in vigour. But you can certainly give 
him high marks for humour ; and you can give 
him very high marks for simplicity and unaffect- 
edness. He is one of the most unfeigned, most 
easy, most natural of English letter-writers. In 
the art of shedding a sedate playfulness over the 
least promising themes, in magnifying the inci- 
dents of his ' set gray life 1 into occurrences 
worthy of record, in communicating to his page 
all the variations of mood that sweep across him 
as he writes, he is unrivalled. Some one chris- 
tened Addison a parson in a tye-wig ; Cowper 
(at his best) is a humourist in a nightcap. It 
would be easy to select from his correspondence 
passages that show him in all these aspects — 
morbid and gloomy to Newton, genial and 
friendly to Hill and Unwin, confidential and 



1 86 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

caressing to Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh. 
But it is not uncommon for him to vary his tone 
to each of these, for which reason we close with 
an epistle to that austere friend and monitor 
who has perhaps been credited with a more 
baleful influence over his hypochondriac corre- 
spondent than is strictly borne out by the evi- 
dence. The reader may be told, since he must 
speedily discover it, that the following letter 
from Cowper to John Newton, like the title- 
page of Mr. Lowell's ' Fable for Critics,' is in 
rhymed prose : 

My very dear Friend, — I am going to 
send, what when you have read, you may 
scratch your head, and say, I suppose, there 's 
nobody knows whether what I have got be 
verse or not ; — by the tune and the time, 
it ought to be rhyme, but if it be, did you 
ever see, of late or of yore, such a ditty 
before ? 

I have writ ' Charity,' not for popularity, but 
as well as I could, in hopes to do good ; and if 
the Reviewer should say ' to be sure the gentle- 
man's Muse wears Methodist shoes, you may 
know by her pace and talk about grace, that 
she and her bard have little regard for the taste 
and fashions, and ruling passions, and hoiden- 



In Cowper's Arbour. 187 

ing play, of the modern day ; and though she 
assume a borrowed plume, and now and then 
wear a tittering air, 'tis only her plan to 
catch, if she can, the giddy and gay, as they 
go that way, by a production on a new con- 
struction : she has baited her trap, and hopes 
to snap all that may come with a sugar plum.' 
— His opinion in this will not be amiss ; 
'tis what I intend, my principal end, and, if I 
succeed, and folks should read, till a few are 
brought to a serious thought, I shall think I 
am paid for all I have said and all I have 
done, though I have run many a time, after 
a rhyme, as far as from hence to the end of 
my sense, and by hook or crook, write 
another book, if I live and am here, another 
year. 

I have heard before of a room with a floor 
laid upon springs, and such like things, with so 
much art in every part, that when you went in 
you was forced to begin a minuet pace, with an 
air and a grace, swimming about, now in and 
now out, with a deal of state, in a figure of 
eight, without pipe, or string, or any such thing ; 
and now I have writ, in a rhyming fit, what will 
make you dance, and, as you advance, will keep 
you still, though against your will, dancing 
away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of 



1 88 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

what I have penn'd, which that you may do, 
ere Madam and you are quite worn out with 
gigging about, I take my leave, and here you 
receive a bow profound, down to the ground, 
from your humble me — W. C 



THE QUAKER OF ART. 

A BOVE the chimney-piece in the Study at 
^"*- Abbotsford, and therefore on Sir Walter's 
right-hand as he wrote, hung — nay, hangs, if 
we may trust the evidence of a photograph be- 
fore us — a copy of the Schiavonetti-cum-Heath 
engraving of Thomas Stothard's once-popular 
1 Canterbury Pilgrims.' With its dark oblong 
frame and gold corner-ornaments, it must still 
look much as it did on that rainy August morn- 
ing described in Lockhart, when one of Scott's 
guests, occupied ostensibly with the last issues 
of the Bannatyne Club, sat listening in turn to 
the patter of the drops on the pane, and the 
' dashing trot' of his host's pen across the paper 
to which he was then committing the first series 
of the ' Tales of a Grandfather.' The visitor 
(it was that acute and ingenious John Ley- 
cester Adolphus whose close-reasoned ' Letters 
to Richard Heber' had practically penetrated the 
mystery of the ' Waverley Novels ') specially 



190 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

noticed the picture ; and he also afterwards 
recalled and repeated a characteristic comment 
made upon it by Scott, with whom it was evi- 
dently a favourite, in one of those brief dia- 
logues which generally took place when it 
became necessary to consult a book upon the 
shelves. Were the procession to move, re- 
marked Sir Walter, the prancing young 'Squire 
in the foreground would be over his horse's 
head in a minute. The criticism was more 
of the riding-school than the studio ; and too 
much might easily be inferred from it as to the 
speaker's equipments as an Art-critic. For 
Art itself, we are told, notwithstanding his 
genuine love of landscape and natural objects, 
Scott cared nothing ; and Abbotsford was rich 
rather in works suggestive and commemorative, 
than in masterpieces of composition and colour. 
1 He talked of scenery as he wrote of it,' says 
Leslie in his 'Recollections,' Mike a painter; 
and yet for pictures, as works of art, he had little 
or no taste, nor did he pretend to any. To him 
they were interesting merely as representing 
some particular scene, person, or event, and 
very moderate merit in their execution con- 
tented him.' Stothard's cavalcade, progressing 
along the pleasantly undulated background of 
he Surrey Hills, with its drunken Miller dron- 



The Quaker of Art. 191 

ing on his bagpipes at the head, with its bibu- 
lous Cook at the tail, and between these, all 
that moving, many-coloured pageant of Middle- 
Age society upon which Geoffrey Chaucer 
looked five hundred years ago, must have been 
thoroughly to his liking, besides reaching a 
higher artistic standard than he required. To 
one whose feeling for the past has never yet 
been rivalled, such a picture would serve as a 
perpetual fount of memory and association. 
He must besides have thoroughly appreciated 
its admitted accuracy of costume, and it would 
not have materially affected his enjoyment if 
the Dick Tintos or Dick Minims of his day 
had assured him that, as a composition, it was 
deficient in ' heroic grasp,' or had reiterated 
the stereotyped objection that the Wife of Bath 
was far too young-looking to have buried five 
lawful husbands. 

The original oil-sketch from which the ' Can- 
terbury Pilgrims ' was engraved, is now in the 
National Gallery, having been bought some 
years ago, with Hogarth's ' Polly Peachum,' 
at the dispersal of the Leigh Court Collection. 
It is not, however, by his more ambitious efforts 
that Stothard is most regarded in our day. Now 
and then, it maybe, the Abbotsford engraving, or 
'The Flitch of Bacon,' or 'John Gilpin,' makes 



192 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

fitful apparition in the print-shop windows ; 
now and then again, in some culbute g&n&rale, 
of the bric-d-brac merchant, there comes 
forlornly to the front a card-table contrived 
adroitly from the once famous Waterloo Shield. 
But it is not by these, or by the huge designs 
on the staircase at Burleigh (* Burleigh-house 
by Stamford-town'), or by any of the efforts 
which his pious biographer and daughter-in-law 
fondly ranked with Raphael and Rubens, that 
he best deserves remembrance. Time, deal- 
ing summarily with an unmanageable inheri- 
tance, has a trick of making rough and ready 
distinctions ; and Time has decided, not that 
he did these things ill, but that he did other 
things better — for instance, book illustrations. 
And the modern collector is on the side of 
Time. Stothard as a colourist (and here per- 
haps is some injustice) he disregards : Stothard 
as a history-painter he disavows. But for Stot- 
hard as the pictorial interpreter of ' David 
Simple ' and ' Betsy Thoughtless, 1 of ' The 
Virtuous Orphan' and the ' Tales of the Genii,' 
of 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandisbn/ or 
(to cite another admirer, Charles Lamb) of that 
1 romantic tale ' 

' Where Glums and Gawries wear mysterious things, 
That serve at once for jackets and for wings,' — 



The Quaker of Art. 193 

to wit, ' The Life and Adventures of Peter 
Wiikins,' 1 he cares very much indeed. He is 
not surprised that they gained their designer 
the friendship of Flaxman ; and if he is not 
able to say with Elia, — 

' In several ways distinct you make us feel, — 
Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel' — 

epithets which, in our modern acceptation of 
them, sound singularly ill-chosen, he can at 
least admit that if his favourite is occasion- 
ally a little monotonous and sometimes a little 
insipid, there are few artists in England in whose 
performances the un-English gift of grace is so 
unmistakably present. 

Fifty years ago there were but few specimens 
of Stothard's works in the Print Room of the 
British Museum, and even those were not ar- 
ranged so as to be easily accessible. To-day, 
this complaint, which Pye makes in that mis- 
cellany of unexpected information, his ' Patron- 
age of British Art,' can no longer be renewed. 
In the huge Balmanno collection, a labour of 
five-and-twenty years, the student may now 
study his Stothard to his heart's content. Here 

1 Coleridge is also extravagant on this theme in his 
' Table Talk.' ' If it were not for a certain tendency to 
affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high,' he says, 
•for Stothard's designs [to Peter Wiikins].' 

13 



194 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

is brought together his work of all sorts, his 
earliest and latest, his strongest and his feeblest, 
from the first tentative essays he made for 
the ; Lady's Magazine' and Hervey's 'Naval 
History' to those final designs, which, aided 
by the supreme imagination of Turner, did so 
much to vitalise the finicking and overlaboured 
couplets of his faithful but fastidious patron at 
St. James's Place. 

' Of Rogers's " Italy," Luttrell relates, 
It would surely be dished, if 't were not for the plates, 

said the wicked wits of 1830 ; and the sarcasm 
has its parallel in the ' Ce poete se sauve du 
naufrage de planche en planche/ which the 
Abbe Galiani applied to Dorat embellished by 
Marillier and Eisen. But Stothard did many 
things besides illustrating Samuel Rogers. Al- 
manack heads and spelling-books, spoon-handles 
and decanter labels, — nothing came amiss to his 
patient industry. And in his book illustrations 
he had one incalculable advantage, — he lived 
in the silver age of line engraving, the age of the 
Cooks and Warrens and Heaths and Findens. 

Shakespeare and Bunyan, Macpherson and 
Defoe, Boccaccio and Addison, — most of the 
older classics passed under his hand. It is 
the fashion in booksellers' catalogues to vaunt 



The Quaker of Art. 195 

the elaborate volumes he did in later life for the 
banker poet. But it is not in these, nor his 
more ambitious efforts, that the true lover of 
Stothard finds his greatest charm. He is the 
draughtsman of fancy rather than imagination ; 
and he is moreover better in the mellow copper 
of his early days than the ' cold steel ' of his de- 
cline. If you would view your Stothard aright, 
you must take him as the illustrator of the 
eighteenth-century novelists, of Richardson, of 
Fielding, of Sterne, of Goldsmith, where the 
costume in which he delighted was not too 
far removed from his own day, and where the 
literary note was but seldom pitched among the 
more tumultuous passions. In this semi-domes- 
tic atmosphere he moves always easily and 
gracefully. His conversations and interviews, 
his promenade and garden and tea-table scenes, 
his child-life with its pretty waywardnesses, his 
ladies full of sensibility and in charming caps, 
his men respectful and gallant in their ruffles 
and silk stockings, — in all these things he is at 
home. The bulk of his best work in this way is 
in ' Harrison's Magazine,' and in the old double- 
column edition of the essayists, where it is set 
off for the most part by the quaint and pretty 
framework which was then regarded as an in- 
dispensable decoration to plates engraved for 



196 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

books. If there be anything else of his which 
the eclectic (not indiscriminate) collector should 
secure, it is two of the minor Rogers volumes 
for which the booksellers care little. One is 
the ' Pleasures of Memory ' of 1802, if only for 
Heath's excellent engraving of ' Hunt the Slip- 
per ; ' the other is the same poems of 18 10 with 
Luke Clennell's admirable renderings of the 
artist's quill-drawings, — renderings to rival 
which, as almost faultless reproductions of 
pen-and-ink, we must go right back to Hans 
Liitzelburger, and Holbein's famous ' Dance of 
Death.' 

There is usually one thing to be found in 
Stothard's designs which many of his latter-day 
successors, who seem to care for little except 
making an effective ' compo,' are often in the 
habit of neglecting. He is generally fairly 
loyal to his text, and honestly endeavours to 
interpret it pictorially. Take, for example, a 
sketch at random, — the episode of the acci- 
dent to Count Galiano's baboon in Sharpe's 
' Gil Bias.' You need scarcely look at Le Sage ; 
the little picture gives the entire story. There, 
upon the side of the couch, is the Count in an 
undress, — effeminate, trembling, almost tearful. 
Beside him is his wounded favourite, turning 
plaintively to its agitated master, while the 



The Quaker of Art. 197 

hastily summoned surgeon, his under lip pro- 
truded, professionally binds up the injured limb. 
Around are the servants in various attitudes of 
sycophantic sympathy. Or take from a mere 
annual, the 'Forget-me-not' of 1828, this 
little genre picture out of Sterne. Our old 
friend Corporal Trim is moralising in the 
kitchen to the hushed Shandy servants on 
Master Bobby's death. He has let fall his 
hat upon the ground, * as if a heavy lump of 
clay had been kneaded into the crown of it.' 
4 Are we not here now,' says Trim, ' and are 
we not gone ! in a moment.' Holding her 
apron to her eyes the sympathetic Susannah 
leans her hand confidingly upon Trim's shoulder; 
Jonathan, the coachman, with a mug of ale on 
his knee, stares with dropped lip at the hat, as 
if he expected it to do something ; Obadiah 
wonders at Trim ; the cook pauses as she lifts 
the lid of a cauldron at the fire, and the ' foolish 
fat scullion' — the 'foolish fat scullion' who 
' had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy ' 
and is still immortal — looks up enquiringly 
from the fish-kettle she is scouring on her 
knees. It is all there ; and Stothard has told 
us all of it that pencil could tell. 

In the vestibule at Trafalgar Square is a bust 
of Stothard by Baily, which gives an excellent 



198 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. . 

idea of the dignified yet deferential old gentle- 
man, who said 'Sir' in speaking to you, like 
Dr. Johnson, and whose latter days were passed 
as Librarian of the Royal Academy. Another 
characteristic likeness is the portrait, now in 
the National Portrait Gallery, which was en- 
graved by Scriven in 1833 for Arnold's ' Library 
of the Arts,' and once belonged to Samuel 
Rogers. The story of Stothard's life has little 
memorable but the work that filled and satis- 
fied it. Placid, placable, unpretentious, mod- 
estly unsolicitous of advancement, labouring 
assiduously but cheerfully for miserable wage, 
he seems to have existed at equipoise, neither 
exalted nor depressed by the extremes of either 
fortune. He was an affectionate father and a 
tender husband ; and yet so even-pulsed that 
on his wedding-day he went as usual to the 
drawing-school ; and he bore more than one 
heart-rending bereavement with uncomplaining 
patience. For nearly forty years he lived con- 
tentedly in one house (28 Newman Street) with 
little change beyond an occasional country ex- 
cursion when he would study butterflies for his 
fairies' wings, or a long walk in the London 
streets and suburbs, when he would note at 
every turn some new gesture or some fresh 
group for his ever-growing storehouse of im- 



The Quaker of Art. 199 

agination. It is to this unremitting habit of 
observation that we owe the extraordinary 
variety and fecundity of his compositions ; to 
it also must be traced their occasional executive 
defects. That no two men will draw from the 
living model in exactly the same way, is a 
truism. But the artist, who, neglecting the 
model almost wholly, draws by preference from 
his note-book, is like a man who tells a story 
heard in the past of which he has retained the 
spirit rather than the details. He will give it 
the cachet of his personal qualities ; he will 
reproduce it with unfettered ease and freedom ; 
but those who afterwards compare it with the 
original will find to their surprise that the origi- 
nal was not exactly what they had been led to 
expect. In a case like the present where the 
artist's mind is so uniformly pure and innocent, 
so constitutionally gentle and refined, the gain 
of individuality is far greater than the loss of 
finish and academic accuracy. If to Stothard's 
grace and delicacy we add a certain primness 
of conception, a certain prudery of line, it is 
difficult not to recognise the fitness of that 
happy title which was bestowed upon him by 
the late James Smetham. He is the ' Quaker 
of Art.' 



BEWICK'S TAILPIECES. 

T3ETWEEN the years 1767 and 178$, travel- 
•*-* lers going southward to Newcastle along 
the right bank of the Tyne must frequently have 
encountered a springy, well-set lad walking, or 
oftener running, rapidly in the opposite direc- 
tion. During the whole of that period, which 
begins with Thomas Bewick's apprenticeship 
and closes with the deaths of his father and 
mother, he never ceased to visit regularly the 
little farm at Cherryburn where he was born. 

' Dank and foul, dank and foul, 
By the smoky town in its murky cowl,' 

is the Tyne at Newcastle, where he lived his 
working life ; but at Ovingham, where he lies 
buried, and whence you can see the remains of 
his birthplace, it still flows 

' clear and cool, 
By laughing shallow, and dreaming pool/ 

like the river in the ' Water-Babies,' and one 
can easily conceive with what an eagerness the 
country-bred engraver's-apprentice must have 



Bewick's Tailpieces. 201 

turned, in those weekly escapes from the great, 
gloomy manufacturing city, to the familiar sights 
and sounds of nature which had filled his boy- 
hood with delight. To his love for these things 
we are indebted for his best work; it was his 
intimate acquaintance with them that has kept 
his memory green ; and, even when he was an 
old man, they prompted some of the most effec- 
tive passages of those remarkable recollections 
which, despite their longueurs et langueurs, 
present so graphic a picture of his early life. 
* I liked my master,' he says ; ' I liked the busi- 
ness ; but to part from the country, and to leave 
all its beauties behind me, with which I had 
been all my life charmed in an extreme degree, 
— and in a way I cannot describe, — I can 
only say my heart was like to break.' And 
then he goes on to show how vivid still, at a 
distance of sixty years, was that first scene of 
separation. ' As we passed away, I inwardly 
bade farewell to the whinny wilds, to Mickley 
bank, to the Stob-cross hill, to the water-banks, 
the woods, and to particular trees, and even to 
the large hollow old elm, which had lain per- 
haps for centuries past, on the haugh near the 
ford we were about to pass, and which had 
sheltered the salmon-fishers, while at work 
there, from many a bitter blast. 1 



202 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

As an artist on wood, as the reviver of the 
then disused art of Xylography — a subject 
hedged round with many delicate and hair- 
splitting controversies — it is not now necessary 
to speak of Bewick. Nor need anything be 
said here of his extraordinary skill — a skill 
still unrivalled — in delineating those 'beau- 
tiful and interesting aerial wanderers of the 
British Isles,' as he styles them in his old- 
fashioned language, the birds of his native 
country. In both of these respects, although 
he must always be accomplished, he may one day 
be surpassed. But as regards his vignettes or 
tailpieces (' talepieces ' they might be called, 
since they always tell their story), it is not 
likely that a second Bewick will arise. They 
were imitated in his own day ; they are imitated 
still — only to prove once more how rare and 
exceptional is the peculiarly individual combina- 
tion that produced them. Some of his own 
pupils, Luke Clennell, for instance, working 
under his eye and in his atmosphere, have occa- 
sionally trodden hard upon his heels in land- 
scape ; others, as Robert Johnson, have caught 
at times a reflex of his distinctive humour ; but, 
as a rule, a Bewick tailpiece of the best period 
is a thing per se, unapproachable, inimitable, 
unique ; and they have contributed far more — 



Bewick's Tailpieces. 203 

these labours of his playtime — to found his 
reputation than might be supposed. If you ask 
a true Bewickian about Bewick, he will begin 
by dilating upon the markings of the Bittern, 
the exquisite downy plumage of the Short-eared 
Owl, the lustrous spring coat of the Starling, 
the relative and competitive excellences of the 
Woodcock and the White Grouse ; but sooner 
or later he will wander off unconsciously to the 
close-packed pathos of the microscopic vignette 
where the cruel cur is tearing at the worried 
ewe, whose poor little knock-kneed lamb looks 
on in trembling terror ; or to the patient, mel- 
ancholy shapes of the black and white horses 
seen vaguely through the pouring rain in the 
tailpiece to the Missel Thrush ; or to the ex- 
cellent jest of the cat stealing the hypocrite's 
supper while he mumbles his long-winded grace. 
He will tell you how Charles Kingsley, the 
brave and manly, loved these things ; how they 
fascinated the callow imagination of Charlotte 
Bronte in her dreary moorland parsonage ; how 
they stirred the delicate insight of the gentle, 
pure-souled Leslie ; and how Ruskin (albeit 
nothing if not critical) has lavished upon them 
some of the most royal of his epithets. 1 

1 Mr. Ruskin, it may be hinted, expounding the tail- 
pieces solely by the light of his intuitive faculty, has 



204 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

1 No Greek work is grander than the angry 
dog,' he says, referring to a little picture of which 
an early proof, on the old rag-paper held by col- 
lectors to be the only fitting background for a 
Bewick, now lies before us. A tramp, with his 
wallet or poke at his side, his tattered trousers 
corded at the knees, and his head bound with a 
handkerchief under his shapeless hat, has sham- 
bled, in his furtive, sidelong fashion, through 
the open gates of a park, only to find himself 
confronted by a watchful and resolute mastiff. 
He lifts his stick, carved rudely with a bird's 
head, the minute eye and beak of which are 
perfectly clear through a magnifying-glass, and 
holds it mechanically with both hands across his 
body, just as tramps have done immemorially 
since the days of the Dutchman Jacob Cats, in 
whose famous ' Emblems ' there is an almost 
similar scene. The dog, which you may en- 
tirely cover with a shilling, is magnificent. 
There is not a line in its body which does not 
tell. The brindling of the back, the white mark- 
ing of the neck and chest — to say nothing of 
the absolute moral superiority of the canine 
guardian to the cowering interloper — are all 
conveyed with the strictest economy of stroke. 

sometimes neglected the well-established traditional in- 
terpretations of Bewick's work. 



Bewick's Tailpieces. 205 

Another tailpiece, to which Ruskin gives the 
adjective ' superb," shows a man crossing a river, 
probably the Tyne. The ice has thawed into 
dark pools on either side, and snow has fallen 
on what remains. He has strapped his bundle 
and stick at his back, and, with the foresight 
taught of necessity in those bridgeless days, is 
astride upon a long bough, so that if by any 
chance the ice gives way, or he plumps into 
some hidden fissure, he may still have hope of 
safety. From the bows of the moored ferry- 
boat in the background his dog anxiously 
watches his progress. When its master is safe 
across, it will come bounding in his tracks. 
The desolate stillness of the spot, the bleak, in- 
hospitable look of the snow-clad landscape, are 
admirably given. But Bewick is capable of 
even higher things than these. He is capable 
of suggesting, in these miniature compositions, 
moments of the keenest excitement, as, for ex- 
ample, in the tailpiece to the Baboon in the 
volume of ' Quadrupeds. 1 A vicious-looking 
colt is feeding in a meadow ; a little tottering 
child of two or three plucks at its long taiL 
The colt's eye is turned backward ; its heel is 
ominously raised ; and over the North Country 
stile in the background a frightened relative 
comes rushing. The strain of the tiny group is 



2o6 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

intense ; but as the little boy was Bewick's 
brother, who grew up to be a man, we know 
that no harm was done. Strangely enough, the 
incident depicted is not without a hitherto un- 
noticed parallel. Once, when Hartley Cole- 
ridge was a child, he came home with the mark 
of a horse hoof impressed unmistakably upon 
his pinafore. Being questioned, he admitted 
that he had been pulling hairs out of a horse's 
tail ; and his father could only conclude that 
the animal, with intentional forbearance, had 
gently pushed him backward. 1 

In describing the tailpiece to the Baboon, we 
omitted to mention one minor detail, significant 
alike of the artist and his mode of work. The 
presence of a strayed child in a field of flowers 
is not, perhaps, a matter which calls urgently 
for comment. But Bewick leaves nothing un- 
explained. In the shadow of a thicket to the 
left of the spectator is the negligent nurse who 
should have watched over her charge, but who, 
at this precise moment of time, is wholly en- 

1 Hartley Coleridge grew up to write sympathetically, 
in his papers entitled ' Ignoramus on the Fine Arts,' of 
these very tailpieces. In them, he says, Bewick is ' a poet 
— the silent poet of the waysides and hedges. He unites 
the accuracy and shrewdness of Crabbe with the homely 
pathos of Bloomfield. , (Blackwood's Magazine, October, 
1831.) 



Bewick's Tailpieces. 207 

grossed by the attentions of an admirer whose 
arm is round her waist. Nor is it in those ac- 
cessories alone which aid the story that Bewick 
is so careful. His local colouring is scrupu- 
lously faithful to nature, and. although not al- 
ways an actual transcript of it, is invariably 
marked by that accuracy of invention which, 
as some one said of Defoe, ' lies like truth.' 
Nothing in his designs is meaningless. If he 
draws a tree, its kind is always distinguishable ; 
he tells you the nature of the soil, the time of 
year, often the direction of the wind. Refer- 
ring to the * little, exquisitely finished inch-and- 
a-half vignette ' of the suicide in the ' Birds,' 
Henry Kingsley (of whom, equally with his 
brother Charles, it may be said, in the phrase 
of the latter, // salt son Bewick) notes that the 
miserable creature has hanged himself ' in the 
month of June, on an oak bough, stretching 
over a shallow trout stream, which runs through 
carboniferous limestone.' Sero sed serio is the 
motto which Bewick has written under the 
dilapidated, desperate figure, whose dog, even 
as the dog of Sikes in ' Oliver Twist,' is run- 
ning nervously backwards and forwards in its ef- 
forts to reach its pendent, motionless, strangely 
silent master. These mottoes and inscriptions, 
characteristic of the artist, are often most hap- 



208 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

pily effective. Generally, like the Justissima 
Tellus of the vignette of the ploughman, or the 
Grata sume of the spring at which Bewick him- 
self, on his Scotch tour, is drinking from the 
• flipe ■ of his hat, they simply add to the restful 
or rural beauty of the scene ; but sometimes 
they supply the needful key to the story. In 
the tailpiece to the Woodchat, for example, a 
man lies senseless on the ground. His eyes are 
closed, and his hat and wig have fallen back- 
ward. Is he dead, or in a fit, or simply drunk ? 
He is drunk. On a stone hard by is the date 
'4 June, 179^,' and he has obviously been toast- 
ing the nativity of his Majesty George the 
Third. 

But clearness of message, truth to nature, 
and skill in compressed suggestion are not 
Bewick's sole good qualities. He does not 
seem to have known much of Hogarth — per- 
haps the Juvenalian manner of that great graphic 
satirist was not entirely to his taste — but he is 
a humorist to some extent in Hogarth's manner, 
and, after the fashion of his day, he is a moralist. 
He delights in queer dilemmas and odd em- 
barrassments. Now it is a miserly fellow who 
fords a river with his cow to save the bridge 
toll. The water proves deeper than he ex- 
pected ; the cow, to whose tail he is clinging, 






Bewick's Tailpieces. 209 

rather enjoys it ; her master does not. Now it 
is an old man at a standstill on an obstinate 
horse. It is raining heavily, and there is a high 
wind. He has lost his hat and broken his stick, 
but he is afraid to get down because he has a 
basket of excited live fowl on his arm. Occa- 
sionally the humour is a little grim, after the true 
North Country fashion. Such is the case in 
the tailpiece to the Curlew where a blacksmith 
(or is it a tanner ? ) looks on pitiless at the un- 
happy dog with a kettle dangling at its tail ; such, 
again, in the vignette of the mischievous young- 
ster who leads the blind man into mid-stream. 
As a moralist, Bewick is never tired of exhibit- 
ing the lachrimce rerum, the brevity of life, the 
emptiness of fame. The staved-in, useless boat ; 
the ruined and deserted cottage, with the grass 
growing at the hearthstone ; the ass rubbing 
itself against the pillar that celebrates the ' glo- 
rious victory ; ' the churchyard, with its rising 
moon, and its tombstone legend, ' Good 
Times, bad Times, and all Times got over,' are 
illustrations of this side of his genius. But the 
subject is one which could not be exhausted in 
many papers, for this little gallery is Bewick's 
* criticism of life/ and he had seventy-five years 1 
experience. His final effort was a ferryman 
waiting to carry a coffin from Eltringham to 

14 



210 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Ovingham ; and on his death-bed he was medi- 
tating his favourite work. In a lucid moment 
of his last wanderings he was asked of what he 
had been thinking, and he replied, with a faint 
smile, that he had been devising subjects for 
some new Tailpieces. 



A GERMAN IN ENGLAND. 

YT/'HEN, in 1768, the yet undistinguished 
'* James Boswell of Auchinleck gave to 
the world his ' Journal of a Tour to Corsica, 1 
Gray wrote to Horace Walpole from Pembroke 
College that the book had strangely pleased and 
moved him. Then, with the curious contempt 
for the author which that egregious personage 
seems to have inspired in so many of his con- 
temporaries, Gray goes on : ' The pamphlet 
proves what I have always maintained, that any 
fool may write a most valuable book by chance, 
if he will only tell us what he heard and saw 
with veracity.' This is an utterance which 
suggests that sometimes even the excellent 
critic Mr. Gray, like the Sage of Gough Square, 
4 talked laxly. 1 At all events this particular exam- 
ple scarcely illustrates his position. There was 
more than mere veracity in BoswelFs method. 
Conscious or unconscious, his faculty for re- 
producing his impressions effectively, and his 
thoroughly individual treatment of his material, 
are far more nearly akin to genius than folly. 



212 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Nor could his success be said to be a matter 
of chance, since on two subsequent occasions 
— in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' and the 
1 Life of Johnson ' — he not only repeated that 
success, but carried further towards perfection 
those fortunate characteristics which he had 
exhibited at first. Walpole, if we may trust 
the title-page of the ' little lounging miscellany ' 
known as ' Walpoliana/ reported his friend's 
dictum with greater moderation. ' Mr. Gray the 
poet has often observed to me, that, if any 
person were to form a Book of what he had 
seen and heard himself, it must, in whatever 
hands, prove a most useful and entertaining 
one. 1 As a generalisation, this leaves nothing 
to be desired. That the unaffected record of 
ordinary experiences, ' honestly set down,' is 
seldom without its distinctive charm, needs no 
demonstration ; and when lapse of time has 
added its grace of remoteness, the charm is 
heightened. These considerations must serve 
as our excuse for recalling a half-forgotten 
1 pamphlet ' — as Gray would have styled it — 
which points the moral of his amended apho- 
rism far better than Boswell's ' Tour.' 

The narrative of Charles P. Moritz's ' Trav- 
els, chiefly on Foot, through several Parts of 
England, 1 belongs to 1782. It was first pub- 



A German in England. 213 

lished at Berlin in 1783, and the earliest English 
version is dated 179$. The second edition 
(now before us) came two years later, and 
other issues are occasionally met with in book- 
sellers' catalogues ; besides which, John Pin- 
kerton, the compiler of the ' Walpoliana 1 above 
mentioned, included the book in the second 
volume of his ' Collections of Voyages,' etc., and 
Mavor also reprinted it in vol. ix. of his ' British 
Tourist. 1 1 The English translator was a ' very 
young lady,' said to be the daughter of an un- 
identified personage referred to by the author : 
the editor, who, in a copious preface, testifies, 
among other things, to the favourable recep- 
tion of the work in Berlin and Germany gener- 
ally, remains anonymous. Moritz himself, the 
writer of the volume, was a young Prussian 
clergyman, enthusiastic about England and 
things English, who came among us ' to draw 
Miltonic air 1 (in Gay's phrase), and to read 
his beloved ' Paradise Lost ' in the very land of 
its conception. He stayed exactly seven weeks 
in this country, three of which he spent in 
London, the rest being occupied by visits to 
Oxford, Birmingham, the Peak, and elsewhere. 
What he sees, and what he admires (and luckily 

1 It is also included, with some omissions, in CasselTs 
excellent ' National Library.' 



214 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

for us he admires a great deal), he describes in 
letters to one Frederic Gedike, a professorial 
friend at Berlin. 

His first communication, dated 31st May, de- 
picts his progress up the Thames, which he re- 
gards as greatly surpassing even ' the charming 
banks of the Elbe.'' Then he disembarks near 
Dartford, whence, with two companions, he 
posts to London, behind a round-hatted postilion 
4 with a nosegay in his bosom. 1 He is delighted 
with the first view he gets of an English soldier, 
' in his red uniform, his hair cut short and 
combed back on his forehead, so as to afford a 
full view of his fine broad manly face.' He 
is interested also to see two boys engaged in 
the national pastime of boxing ; and he mar- 
vels at the huge gateway-like sign-posts of the 
village inns. Passing over Westminster Bridge, 
he does not, like Wordsworth, burst into a 
sonnet, but he is impressed (as who would not 
be 1) by that unequalled coup d'ceiL l The pros- 
pect from this bridge alone, 1 he says, ' seems to 
afford one the epitome of a journey, or a voyage 
in miniature, as containing something of every- 
thing that most usually occurs on a journey.' 
Presently, a little awed by the prodigious great- 
ness and gloom of the houses (which remind 
him of Leipzig), he takes lodgings in George 



A German in England. 215 

Street, Strand, with a tailor's widow, not very 
far, as he is pleased to discover, from that 
Adelphi Terrace where once ' lived the re- 
nowned Garrick.' To his simple tastes his 
apartments, with their leather-covered chairs, 
carpeted floors and mahogany tables, have an air 
of splendour. ' I may do just as I please, 1 he 
says, ' and keep my own tea, coffee, bread and 
butter, for which purpose [and here comes a 
charming touch of guilelessness !] my landlady 
has given me a cupboard in my room, which 
locks up.' With one of his landlady's sons for 
guide, he makes the tour of St. James's Park 
(where you may buy milk warm from the cow), 
and he experiences for the first time ' the ex- 
quisite pleasure of mixing freely with a con- 
course of people, who are for the most part 
well dressed and handsome.' His optimism 
finds a further gratification in the ' sweet se- 
curity' (the expression is not his, but Lamb's) 
which is afforded ' from the prodigious crowd 
of carts and coaches,' by the footways on either 
side of the streets ; and he explains to his 
'dearest Gedike ' the mysteries of giving the 
wall, He thinks London better lighted than 
Berlin (which implies little short of Cimmerian 
darkness in that centre of civilisation !), and 
he waxes sorrowful over the general evidence of 



216 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

dram-drinking and the sale of spirituous liquors. 
1 In the late riots [i. e. the Gordon Riots of 
1780], which even yet are hardly quite sub- 
sided, and which are still the general topic of 
conversation, more people have been found 
dead near empty brandy-casks in the streets, 
than were killed by the musket-balls of regi- 
ments, that were called in.' Another thing 
which strikes him as foreign to his experience is 
the insensibility of the crowd to funerals. ' The 
people seem to pay as little attention to such a 
procession, as if a hay-cart were driving past.' 
Among more pleasurable novelties, are the Eng- 
lish custom of sleeping without a feather bed, 
and the insular institution of ' buttered toast,' 
which, incredible as it may sound, appears to 
have been still an unknown luxury in the land 
of Werther. 1 

1 Another of his remarks is of special interest in our 
day: — 'That same influenza, which I left at Berlin, I 
have had the hard fortune again to find here ; and many 
people die of W (the italics are ours). Elsewhere he 
says that the Prussian quack Katterfelto, — Cowper's 

1 Katerfelto, with his hair on end, 
At his own wonders wondering for his bread,' — 

whose advertisements were then in every paper, at- 
tributed the epidemic to ,a minute insect, against which, 
of course, he professed to protect his patients. Wal- 
pole's correspondence contains references to the same 



A German in England. 217 

On the second Sunday after his arrival he 
preaches at the German Church on Ludgate 
Hill for the pastor, the Rev. Mr. Wendeborn, 
who resides ' in a philosophical, but not un- 
improving retirement' at chambers in New 
Inn, — and he visits the Prussian Ambassador, 
Count Lucy, with whom, over a ' dish of 
coffee ' he has a learned argument upon the 
pending dispute ' about the tacismus or sta- 
cismus.' Then he pays a visit to Vauxhall 
Gardens. Comparing great things with small, 
he traces certain superficial resemblances be- 
tween the Surrey Paradise and the similar 
resort at Berlin, — resemblances which are en- 
forced by his speedy discovery of that chiefest 
glory of the English gardens, Roubillac's statue 
of Handel. The Gothic orchestra, and the 
painted ruins at the end of the walks (some- 
times used by flippant playwrights as similes 
for beauty in decay) also come in for a share 
of his admiration ; and he is particularly im- 
pressed by Hayman's pictures in the Rotunda. 
' You here, 1 he adds, speaking of this last, 

visitation. It was, he writes, 'universal,' but not 'danger- 
ous or lasting.' ' The strangest part of it,' he tells Mann 
in June, ' is, that, though of very short duration, it has 
left a weakness or lassitude, of which people find it very 
difficult to recover.' 



218 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

1 find the busts of the best English authors, 
placed all round on the sides. Thus a Briton 
again meets with his Shakespeare, Locke, Mil- 
ton, and Dryden in the public places of his 
amusements ; and there also reveres their 
memory. 1 He finds further confirmation of 
this honoured position of letters in the popu- 
larity of the native classics as compared with 
those of Germany, ' which in general are read 
only by the learned ; or, at most, by the 
middle class of people. The English national 
authors are in all hands, and read by all people, 
of which the innumerable editions they have 
gone through, are a sufficient proof. 1 In Ger- 
many ' since Gellert [of the Fables], there has 
as yet been no poet's name familiar to the 
people. 1 But in England even his landlady 
studies her ' Paradise Lost, 1 and indeed by her 
own account won the affections of her husband 
(now deceased) ' because she read Milton with 
such proper emphasis. 1 Another institution that 
delights him is the second-hand bookseller, at 
whose movable stall you may buy odd volumes 
1 so low as a penny ; nay, even sometimes for an 
half-penny a piece. 1 Of one of these ' itinerant 
antiquarians ' he buys the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' 
in two volumes for sixpence. 

After Vauxhall follows, as a matter of course, 



A German in England. 219 

a visit to the equally popular Ranelagh. Like 
most people, the traveller had expected it to 
resemble its rival, and until he actually entered 
the Great Room, was grievously disappointed. 
* But, 1 he continues, ' it is impossible to de- 
scribe, or indeed to conceive, the effect it had 
on me, when, coming out of the gloom of the 
garden, I suddenly entered a round building, 
illuminated by many hundred lamps, the splen- 
dour and beauty of which surpassed every thing 
of the kind I had ever seen before. Every- 
thing seemed here to be round ; above, there 
was a gallery, divided into boxes, and in one 
part of it an organ with a beautiful choir, from 
which issued both instrumental and vocal music. 
All around, under this gallery, are handsome 
painted boxes for those who wish to take re- 
freshments. The floor was covered with mats ; 
in the middle of which are four high black 
pillars, within which are neat fire-places for pre- 
paring tea, coffee, and punch ; and all around 
also there are placed tables, set out with all 
kinds of refreshments. Within [he means 
'without'] these four pillars, in a kind of 
magic rotundo, all the beau-monde of London 
move perpetually round and round.' This, as 
may be seen by a glance at Parr's print of 175 1 
after Canaletti, or the better-known plate in 



220 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Stowe's 'Survey' of 1754, is a fairly faithful 
description of the Ranelagh of Walpole and 
Chesterfield. After a modest consommation, 
which, to his astonishment, he finds is covered 
by the half-crown he paid at the door, he 
mounts to the upper regions. ' I now went up 
into the gallery, and seated myself in one of 
the boxes there : and from thence, becoming, 
all at once, a grave and moralising spectator, I 
looked down on the concourse of people who 
were still moving round and round in the fairy 
circle ; and then I could easily distinguish sev- 
eral stars, and other orders of knighthood ; 
French queues and bags contrasted with plain 
English heads of hair, or professional wigs ; 
old age and youth, nobility and commonalty, 
all passing each other in the motley swarm. 
An Englishman who joined me, during this my 
reverie, pointed out to me, on my enquiring, 
princes, and lords with their dazzling stars ; 
with which they eclipsed the less brilliant part 
of the company.' 

His next experiences are of the House of 
Commons. Here he had like to have been 
disappointed from his unhappy ignorance of an 
enlightened native formula. Having made his 
way to Westminster Hall, a ' very genteel man 
in black ' informed him he must be introduced 



A German in England. 221 

by a member, an announcement which caused 
him to retire ' much chagrined.' Something 
unintelligible was mumbled behind him about 
a bottle of wine, but it fell on alien ears. As 
soon as he returned home, his intelligent land- 
lady solved the difficulty, sending him back next 
day with the needful douceur, upon which the 
1 genteel man,' with much venal urbanity, 
handed him into a select seat in the Strangers' 
Gallery. The building itself strikes him as 
rather mean, and not a little resembling a 
chapel. But the Speaker and the mace ; the 
members going and coming, some cracking nuts 
and eating oranges, others in their greatcoats 
and with boots and spurs ; the cries of i Hear,' 
and ' Order,' and ' Question,' speedily absorb 
him. On his first visit he is fortunate. The 
debate turns on the reward to Admiral Rodney 
for his victory over De Grasse at Guadaloupe, 
and he hears Fox, Burke, and Rigby speak. 
1 This same celebrated Charles Fox,' he says, 
' is a short, fat, and gross man, with a swarthy 
complexion, and dark ; and in general he is 
badly dressed. There certainly is something 
Jewish in his looks. But upon the whole, he 
is not an ill-made nor an ill-looking man : and 
there are many strong marks of sagacity and 
fire in his eyes. . . . Burke is a well-made, 



222 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

tall, upright man, but looks elderly and broken. 
Rigby is excessively corpulent, and has a jolly 
rubicund face." 

Pastor Moritz repeated his visits to the Par- 
liament House, frankly confessing that he pre- 
ferred this entertainment to most others ; and, 
indeed, it was a shilling cheaper than the pit 
of a theatre. When, after his tour in the 
country, he came back to London, he seems 
at once to have gravitated to Westminster, for 
he gives an account of the discussion on the 
Barre pension which followed the death of 
Lord Rockingham in July. He heard Fox, 
with great eloquence, vindicate his resigna- 
tion ; he heard Horace Walpole's friend, 
General Conway ; he heard Burke, in a pas- 
sion, insisting upon the respect of the house ; 
he heard the youthful Pitt, then scarcely look- 
ing more than one-and-twenty, rivet univer- 
sal attention. A little earlier he had been 
privileged to witness that most English of sights, 
the Westminster election in Covent Garden, 
with its boisterous finale. 'When the whole 
was over, the rampant spirit of liberty, and 
the wild impatience of a genuine English mob, 
were exhibited in perfection. In a very few 
minutes the whole scaffolding, benches, and 



A German in England. 223 

chairs, and everything else, was completely 
destroyed ; and the mat with which it had been 
covered torn into ten thousand long strips or 
pieces, or strings ; with which they encircled 
or enclosed multitudes of people of all ranks. 
These they hurried along with them, and every- 
thing else that came in their way, as trophies 
of joy ; and thus, in the midst of exultation 
and triumph, they paraded through many of the 
most populous streets of London.' 

To the British Museum he paid a flying visit 
of little more than an hour, with a miscellane- 
ous and ' personally conducted' party, — a visit 
scarcely favourable to minute impressions. But 
of the Haymarket Theatre, to which he went 
twice (Covent Garden and Drury Lane being 
closed as usual for the summer months), he gives 
a fairly detailed account. Foote's ' Nabob ' 
was the play on the first night ; that on the 
second, the ; English Merchant,' adapted by the 
elder Colman from the ' Ecossaise ' of Voltaire. 
With this latter he was already familiar in its 
German dress, having seen it at Hamburg. On 
both occasions the performance wound up with 
O'Keeffe's once-famous ballad farce of ' The 
Agreeable Surprise.' That excellent burletta 
singer, John Edwin, took the part of ' Lingo ' 



224 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

the schoolmaster (which he had created), 1 to 
the entire satisfaction of Moritz, who thought 
him, with his ' Amo, amas, I love a lass,' etc. 
and his musical voice, ' one of the best actors 
of all that he had seen,' notwithstanding that 
Jack Palmer (Lamb and Goldsmith's Palmer!) 
acted the Nabob. But if he was pleased with 
the acting, he was not equally impressed by 
the audience. The ceaseless clamour of the 
upper gallery and the steady hail of missiles 
were anything but agreeable. ' Often and often 
whilst I sat here [i. e. in the pit], did a rotten 
orange, or pieces of the peel of an orange, fly 
past me, or past some of my neighbours, and 
once one of them actually hit my hat, without 
my daring to look round, for fear another might 
then hit me on my face.' Another passage 
connected with this part of the entertainment 
illustrates the old fashion of sending the lackeys 
to keep their masters' places : ' In the boxes, 
quite in a corner, sat several servants, who 
were said to be placed there, to keep the seats 
for the families they served, till they should 
arrive ; they seemed to sit remarkably close and 

1 There is a print of Edwin in this character after a pic- 
ture by Alefounder. He was also a favourite ' Croaker ' 
in the 'Good Natur'd Man.' 



A German in England. 225 

still, the reason of which, I was told, was their 
apprehension of being pelted, for, if one of 
them dares but to look out of the box, he is 
immediately saluted with a shower of orange 
peel from the gallery.' 

Over the descriptions of St. Paul's and West- 
minster Abbey we must pass silently, in order 
to accompany the tourist on his road to Derby- 
shire, to the ' natural curiosities ' of which, 
after some hesitation, he felt himself most at- 
tracted. Equipped with a road-book, he set 
out by stage-coach from the White Hart (in 
the Strand) for Richmond, intending thence to 
pursue his journey on foot. According to his 
own account, he must have travelled in just 
such another vehicle as that depicted in 
Hogarth's ' Country Inn-Yard,' and have 
shared the curiosity, so often felt by admirers 
of that veracious picture, and afterwards amply 
gratified in his own case, as to the method by 
which passengers managed to ' fasten them- 
selves securely on the roof.' Luckily the coach 
met neither highwayman nor footpad. At Rich- 
mond he alighted, and is properly enthusiastic, 
almost dithyrambic, over ' one of the first 
situations in the world.' He even got up to 
see the sun rise from Richmond Hill, with the 
usual fate of such premature adventurers, a 

15 



226 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

clouded sky. Then he set out on foot by 
Windsor to Oxford. But he speedily discov- 
ered that, in a horse-riding age, a pedestrian 
was a person of very inferior respectability ; 
and though, modelling himself upon the Vicar 
of Wakefield, he was careful to invite the land- 
lords to drink with him, he found himself gen- 
erally treated with pity or contempt, which, 
when he sat down under a hedge to read Mil- 
ton, almost changed into a doubt of his sanity. 
At most of the inns they declined to give him 
house-room, though, finally, he was allowed to 
enter ' one of those kitchens which I had so 
often read of in Fielding's fine novels,' where, 
just as in those novels, presently arrives a showy 
post-chaise to set the servile establishment in a 
bustle, although the occupants called for noth- 
ing but two pots of beer. After a vain attempt 
to obtain a night's lodging at Nuneham, he 
picks up a travelling companion in the shape of 
a young clergyman, who had been preaching 
at Dorchester and was returning to Oxford. 
His new ally takes him to the time-honoured 
Mitre, where he finds ' a great number of 
clergymen, all with their gowns and bands on, 
sitting round a large table, each with his pot of 
beer before him.' A not very worshipful the- 
ological discussion ensues, which is too long to 



A German in England. 227 

quote, and poor Parson Moritz is so well enter- 
tained that he has a splitting headache next 
morning. To follow his fortunes farther is im- 
possible. From Oxford he goes to Stratford- 
on-Avon, then to Lichfield and Derby, and so 
to his destination, ' the great Cavern near 
Castleton, in the high Peake of Derbyshire/ 
which he describes at length. He returns by 
Nottingham and Leicester, whence, still en- 
thusiastic, but a little weary of his humiliations 
as a 'foot-wobbler/ he takes coach to North- 
ampton, mounting to the top, in company with 
a farmer, a young man and ' a black-a-moor.' 
This eminence proving as perilous as it looked, 
he creeps into the basket, in spite of the warn- 
ings of the black. ' As long as we went up 
hill, it was easy and pleasant. And, having had 
little or no sleep the night before, I was almost 
asleep among the trunks and the packages ; 
but how was the case altered when we came 
to go down hill ; then all the trunks and parcels 
began, as it were, to dance around me, and 
everything in the basket seemed to be alive ; 
and I every moment received from them such 
violent blows, that I thought my last hour was 
come. I now found that what the black had 
told me was no exaggeration ; but all my com- 
plaints were useless. I was obliged to suffer 



228 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

this torture nearly an hour, till we came to an- 
other hill again, when, quite shaken to pieces 
and sadly bruised, I again crept to the top of 
the coach, and took possession of my former 
seat.' No wonder he concludes this part of his 
experiences with a solemn warning to travellers 
to take inside places in English post coaches. 
With his return to London his narrative practi- 
cally ends. But the rapid sketch here given of 
it affords no sufficient hint of the abundance of 
naif detail, of simple enthusiasm and kindly 
wonderment, which characterise its pages. To 
complete the impression given, we should be able 
to suppose the writer resting contentedly from 
a solitary literary effort, and ending tranquil 
days as a kind of German Dr. Primrose, telling 
grandchildren, such as Chodowiecki drew, how 
he once saw Goldsmith's monument in the Great 
Abbey by the Thames, and heard Pitt speak in 
the Parliament House at Westminster. But 
this is to reckon without the all-recording pages 
of the ' Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 1 and 
that harsh resolvent, Fact. For the future of 
Pastor Moritz was not at all in this wise. Be- 
sides his letters to his ' dearest Gedike,' he 
wrote many other works, including a ' psycho- 
logical romance ' and ' Travels in Italy ; ' be- 
came a Fine-Art Professor ; married late in 



A German in England. 229 

life, but not happily ; left no famify ; and, 
last of all, had been dead two years when the 
translation which has formed the subject of 
these pages was first introduced to English 
readers. 



OLD VAUXHALL GARDENS. 

' In gay Vauxhall now saunter beaux and belles, 
And happier cits resort to Sadler's Wells.' 

'T^HUS sings one of Sylvanus Urban's poets, 
* describing the pleasures of Spring in the 
London of George the Second. In the epithet 
'happier' — an epithet probably suggested by 
the not very profound observation that the middle 
classes as a rule took their pleasure less sadly 
than mere persons of quality — there is 'the 
least little touch of spleen.' But the social dis- 
tinction implied between the fashionable gardens 
on the Surrey side of the water and the more 
popular place of entertainment from which the 
tired dyer and his melting wife are trudging 
wearily in Hogarth's ' Evening ' is practically 
preserved in the advertisements to be found, 
between May and August, in the newspapers of 
the time. Sadler's Wells is specific in its at- 
tractions, — its burletta or its rope-dancer : 
Vauxhall, on the contrary, with a disdainful re- 
ticence, — a superbia qucesita mentis befitting 
the 'genuine and only Jarley,' — shortly sets 
forth that its ' Evening Entertainments ' will 
begin on such a date ; that the price of admis- 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 231 

sion is one shilling ; and that the doors will open 
at five. After this notification it continued, at 
rare intervals, to repeat that the gardens were at 
the service of the public ; but made no more defi- 
nite sign. Obviously the thing to do was to go. 
With the help of a few old pamphlets and de- 
scriptions, it is proposed to invite the reader to 
make that expedition, and to revive, if it may be, 
some memory of a place, the traces of which are 
strewn broadcast over the literature of the last 
century. It is true that Vauxhall Gardens sur- 
vived to a date much later than this. But it was 
Vauxhall ' with a difference,' and the Vauxhall 
here intended is Vauxhall in its prime, between 
1750 and 1790, — the Vauxhall of Horace Wal- 
pole and the ' Connoisseur,' — of Beau Tibbs 
and the pawnbroker's widow, — of Fielding's 
* Amelia ' and Fanny Burney's ' Evelina.' 

In 17^0, the customary approach to this 
earthly paradise was still along that silent high- 
way of the Thames over which, nearly forty 
years before, Sir Roger de Coverley and Mr. 
Spectator had been rowed by the wooden-legged 
waterman who had fought at La Hogue. There 
was, indeed, a bridge built or being built at 
Westminster ; but more than half a century was 
to elapse before there was another at Vauxhall. 
This little preliminary boating-party, especially 



22,2 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

to the accompaniment of French horns, must 
have been one of the delights of the journey, 
although, if we are to believe a Gallic poet who 
addressed a copy of verses upon ' Le Vauxhall 
de Londres' to M. de Fontenelle, ' le trajet du 
fleuve fatal ' was not without its terrors to 
would-be visitors. Goldsmith's Mrs. Tibbs, at 
all events, had ' a natural aversion to the water,' 
and when Mr. Matthew Bramble went, he went 
by coach for fear of cold, while the younger and 
bolder spirits of his party took ship from Rane- 
lagh in ' a wherry, so light and slender ' that, 
says poetical Miss Lydia Melford, they looked 
4 like fairies sailing in a nutshell. 1 They were 
four in the boat, she nevertheless adds, besides 
the oarsman ; and if this paper were to be illus- 
trated by fancy pictures, the artist's attention 
might be particularly invited to that very fan- 
tastic fairy, Mrs. Tabitha Bramble, who, we 
are told, * with her rumpt gown and petticoat, 
her scanty curls, her lappet-head, deep triple 
ruffles and high stays,' was (in Lady Griskin's 
opinion) ' twenty good years behind the fashion.' 
What the waterman charged, the fair Lydia does 
not tell us ; but he probably asked more than 
usual for so exceptional a cargo. Meanwhile, 
the old rates shown in the ' Court and City 
Registers ' of the time are moderate enough. 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 233 

From Whitehall Stairs, the favourite starting- 
place, the cost of a pair of oars was sixpence ; 
from the Temple eightpence. For sculls you 
paid no more than half. 

When, after passing Lambeth Palace on the 
left, — and possibly receiving from neighbour- 
ing boats some of those flowers of rhetoric to 
which Johnson once so triumphantly retorted, — 
you reached Vauxhall Stairs, your experiences 
were still, in all probability, those of Lydia 
Melford and her friends. There would be the 
same crush of wherries and confusion of tongues 
at the landing-place, and the same crowd of 
mud-larks and loafers would come rushing into 
the water to offer their unsolicited (but not 
gratuitous) services. Once free of these, a few 
steps would bring you to the unimposing en- 
trance of the garden, — a gate or wicket in the 
front of an ordinary-looking house. Here you 
either exhibited your ticket, or paid your shil- 
ling ; hurried, not without a throb of anticipa- 
tion, down a darkened passage; and then, if 
you were as young and unsophisticated as 
Fanny Bolton in ' Pendennis,' probably uttered 
an involuntary exclamation of wonder as, with 
a sudden sound of muffled music, the many- 
lighted enclosure burst upon your view. There 
seems to be no doubt as to the surprise, height- 



234 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

ened of course by the mean approach, and the 
genuine fascination of this first impression. The 
tall elms and sycamores, with the coloured 
lamps braced to the tree-trunks or twinkling 
through the leaves, the long ranges of alcoves 
with their inviting supper-tables, the brightly- 
shining temples and pavilions, the fading vistas 
and the ever-changing groups of pleasure- 
seekers, must have combined to form a whole 
which fully justified the enthusiasm of contem- 
poraries, even if it did not, in the florid language 
of the old guide-books, exactly ' furnish the pen 
of a sublime and poetic genius with inexhaustible 
scenes of luxuriant fancy.' 

The general disposition of the gardens was 
extremely simple and, in Miss Burney's opinion, 
even ' formal.' Opposite you, as you entered, 
was the Grand Walk, extending the entire length 
of the enclosure for a distance of 900 feet, and 
terminated, at the farther end, by a gilded statue 
of Aurora, apparently ' tip-toe on the mountain 
tops.' For this was afterwards substituted ' a 
grand Gothic obelisk,' at the corners of which 
were painted a number of slaves chained, and 
over them the inscription : 

Spectator 

Fastidiosus 

Sibi Molestus 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 235 

Beyond the end of this walk was a sunk-fence 
or ha-ha which separated the gardens from the 
hayfields then adjoining it. Parallel to the 
Grand Walk ran the South Walk with its trium- 
phal arches ; next to this again was the covered 
alley known indifferently as the Druid's or Dark 
Walk, made rather for ' whispering lovers ' than 
for ' talking age ; ' and last came a fourth walk 
open at the top. Other walks, the chief of 
which was the Cross Walk, traversed the garden 
from side to side ; and in the quadrangle formed 
by the Grand Walk, the Cross Walk, the South 
Walk, and the remaining side of the grounds, 
was a space of about five acres. This, which 
lay to the right of the entrance, was known as 
the Grove. 

The chief feature of the Grove was its open- 
air orchestra, at first no more than a modest 
structure bearing the unambitious title of the 
'rustic music-house.' But about 1758, this 
made way for a much more ornate building ' in 
the Gothic manner,' having, like its predecessor, 
pavilions beneath for the accommodation of 
supper-parties. Above, it contained a magnifi- 
cent organ, in front of which, encircling an 
open space for the singers, were ranged the 
seats and desks of the musicians. This second 
orchestra, which was lavishly ornamented with 



236 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

niches and carvings, was surmounted by the 
ostrich plumes of the Prince of Wales. The 
decorations were modelled in a composition 
said to be known only to the ' ingenious archi- 
tect/ a carpenter named Maidman, and the 
whole was painted ' white and bloom colour.' 
Immediately behind the orchestra was a build- 
ing described as * a Turkish tent,' with a carved 
blue and gold dome supported on eight internal 
Ionic, and twelve external Doric columns. 
This was profusely embellished, both within and 
without, by rich festoons of flowers. A good 
idea of the orchestra in its renovated form may 
be gathered from a little plate by Wale, in which 
the supper-tables are shown laid out in front. 
These for a long time were covered with red 
baize, an arrangement that added greatly to the 
general effect, which was further enhanced by 
arches of coloured lamps and other contrivances. 
There is a tinted design by Rowlandson — one 
indeed of his most popular efforts — depicting a 
motley group in front of the orchestra during 
the performance of Mrs. Weichsel, and number- 
ing among the crowd of listeners the Prince of 
Wales, Perdita, the Duchess of Devonshire, 
Lady Duncannon, and other distinguished per- 
sonages. In a supper-box at the side are John- 
son, Boswell, Goldsmith, and Mrs. Thrale. 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 237 

The musical performances in the orchestra 
generally began at six. At first they were 
wholly instrumental, and confined to ' sonatas 
and concertos.' In time, however, songs were 
added to the programme ; and later still these 
were diversified by catches and glees, which 
generally came in the middle and at the end of 
the sixteen pieces to which the entertainment 
was restricted. Before the introduction of glees 
and catches, it was the practice to wind up with 
a duet or trio, accompanied by a chorus. In 
the old Vauxhall song-books may be studied the 
species of lyric which was trilled or quavered 
nightly from the Gothic aviary in the Grove. 
There is not much variety in these hymns to 
'Jem of Aberdovey' or ' Kate of Aberdare,' and 
the prevailing tone is abjectly sentimental. A 
favourite form was the ' Rondeau,' a much more 
rudimentary production than the little French 
plaything now known by that name, and charac- 
terised chiefly by its immoderate use of the 
refrain. 

' Tarry awhile with me, my Love, 
O tarry awhile with me.' 

This is the artless burden of one of the ' cele- 
brated Roundelays ' sung at Vauxhall by the 
celebrated Mrs. Bland (blandior Orpheo !) to the 



238 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

music of the equally celebrated Mr. James 
Hook ; and the ' young Shepherd by Love sore 
opprest, When the Maid of his heart he fondly 
addrest/ can scarcely be acquitted of needless 
iteration. But the music was often of a much 
higher kind, and the beautiful Shakespearean 
songs of Dr. Augustine Arne, ' When daisies 
pied, 1 and ' Where the bee sucks,' or ' Water 
parted ' from the same composer's Opera of 
' Artaxerxes/ alternated occasionally with the 
more popular ditties which delighted the average 
listener. Hook (the father of Theodore Hook), 
who was organist for upward of forty years, and 
Arne, who often conducted, were the most as- 
siduous composers. Among the female singers 
were many vocal celebrities of the last century, 
— Mrs. Vincent and Miss Brent (of whom Gold- 
smith writes in ' The Bee ' and ' The Citizen of 
the World ; ' the above-named Mrs. Weichsel, 
fair mother of the fairer Mrs. Billington ; Mrs. 
Mountain ; and for men, Denman, Vernon, the 
' great Dignum,' and the famous tenor Beard, 
whose name, together with that of one of his 
gentler colleagues, survives in Churchill's hec- 
toring couplets : 

' Where tyrants rule, and slaves with joy obey, 
Let slavish minstrels pour th' enervate lay; 
To Britons far more noble pleasures spring, 
In native notes whilst Beard and Vincent sing.' 



Old Vanxhall Gardens. 239 

The broad-shouldered poet of the ' Rosciad,' 
and the ' Apology,' it may be added, was himself 
one of the constant frequenters of the garden, 
where he was wont to appear, not in clerical 
black, as in the pit of Drury Lane, but resplen- 
dent in a blue coat, white silk stockings, silver 
shoe-buckles, and a gold-laced hat. 

The ' native notes ' of the orchestra, how- 
ever, could only be comfortably enjoyed in fine 
weather. When it rained, — and the eighteenth 
century had no immunity in this respect, — the 
company, like Mr. Bramble, took shelter in the 
Rotunda. This was a large circular saloon, 
entered through a colonnade to the left of the 
Grand Walk. It was freely furnished with 
busts, mirrors, sconces, and the like. But its 
chief glory was its roof, known popularly as 
' the Umbrella,' and specially constructed for 
musical purposes. Profusely ornamented with 
gilding and festoons, it seems to have presented 
something of the appearance of a large fluted 
shell. When the ' new music room,' as it was at 
first called, was erected, the organ and orchestra 
it contained fronted the entrance through the 
colonnade in the Grove. By and by these were 
moved to the left, so as to face a new room 
which was added to the Rotunda, and ran for- 
ward into the garden at the back of the colon- 



240 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

nade, parallel to the Grove. This room, sup- 
ported by elaborate columns, and lighted from 
two cupolas painted with gods and goddesses, 
must have added materially to the attractions 
of the Rotunda when entered through it. In 
course of time, the spaces between the side 
columns were filled with large pictures repre- 
senting national subjects, from the brush of 
Hogarth's friend, the history painter, Frank 
Hayman. In one, Britannia distributed laurels 
to Lord Granby and other distinguished officers ; 
in another, Clive received the homage of the 
Nabob ; in the third, Neptune rejoiced over 
Hawke's victory of 1759. But the best known, 
and the first finished of the group — it was ex- 
hibited in 1761 — was the surrender of Montreal 
to Amherst. Whether copies of these still exist 
we know not ; but, to judge from its effect 
upon Pastor Moritz, this last, at all events, 
must have had its merits. 1 ' Among the paint- 
ings,' he says, ' one represents the surrender of 
a besieged city. If you look at this painting 
with attention for any length of time, it affects 
you so much that you even shed tears. The 
expression of the greatest distress, even border- 
ing on despair, on the part of the besieged, the 
fearful expectation of the uncertain issue, and 
1 See the preceding paper,' A German in England/ 



Old Vauxhall Gardens, 241 

what the victor will determine concerning those 
unfortunate people, may all be read so plainly, 
and so naturally in the countenances of the in- 
habitants who are imploring for mercy, from the 
hoary head to the suckling whom his mother 
holds up, that you quite forget yourself, and in 
the end scarcely believe it to be a painting 
before you.' 

The new room was entered through a Gothic 
portal or temple, which contained portraits of 
George the Third and Queen Charlotte, and 
also formed the starting-point of a semicircular 
piazza or colonnade that swept round to a similar 
terminal temple at the end of the arc. Between 
these two, in the middle of the semicircle, was 
a higher central structure denominated in old 
prints the Temple of Comus. This is said, 
rather vaguely, to have been ' embellished with 
rays,' and had above it a large star or sun, 
which, from the description, would seem to 
have been illuminated at night. Inside, it was 
painted with a composition ' in the Chinese 
taste ' representing Vulcan catching Mars and 
Venus in the historical net, the painter being 
named (not inappropriately) Risquet. The two 
pavilions or alcoves immediately adjoining also 
contained pictures. To the right a lady and 
gentleman were shown entering Vauxhall ; to 
* 16 



242 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

the left was a presumably emblematic design 
of ' Friendship on the grass, drinking.' Other 
boxes fitted for the accommodation of supper- 
parties, but having no pictorial decorations, ex- 
tended on either side of the Temple of Comus. 

Of the terminal temples, one, as already 
stated, served as the porch to the new room ; 
its fellow at the farther end ultimately formed 
the entrance to a famous and popular entertain- 
ment referred to in a former paper, 1 and known 
indifferently as the ' Waterworks ' or the ' Cas- 
cade.' Some of the earlier references to this, 
or to its earliest form, are more or less con- 
temptuous, as the ' World,' the ' Connoisseur,' 
and the ' Gray's Inn Journal ' all speak of it 
slightingly as the ' Tin Cascade.' But, as time 
went on, it must have been greatly improved. 
Here is Moritz's description of it in 1782 : 
1 Lateish in the evening [i. e. about nine o'clock], 
we were entertained with a sight, that is indeed 
singularly curious and interesting. In a particu- 
lar part of the garden, a curtain was drawn up, 
and by means of some mechanism, of extraordi- 
nary ingenuity, the eye and the ear are so com- 
pletely deceived, that it is not easy to persuade 
one's-self it is a deception ; and that one does 
not actually see and hear a natural waterfall from 
1 See ante, — 'The Citizen of the World.* 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 243 

an high rock.' The next sentence adds a char- 
acteristic detail : ' As every one was flocking 
to this scene in crowds, there arose all at once, 
a loud cry of "Take care of your pockets." 
This informed us, but too clearly, that there were 
some pick-pockets among the crowd, who had 
already made some fortunate strokes.' Ten 
years later still, many other details and effects 
must have been added, since the descriptions 
speak of representations of trees blown by the 
wind, of thatches torn off, of wagons and troops 
of soldiers crossing bridges, etc. By this time, 
in fact, it was a monster ' moving picture,' of 
the kind which Pinchbeck and Fawkes were in 
the habit of exhibiting at Bartholomew Fair. 
But in Goldsmith's day it was still in the ele- 
mentary stage described by Sylvanus Urban in 
August, 1765, that is to say, it exhibited ' a 
beautiful landscape in perspective, with a miller's 
house, a water-mill, and a cascade.' At the 
proper moment this last presented the exact 
appearance of water flowing down a declivity, 
rising up in a foam at the bottom, and then 
gliding away. 

Beyond the terminal temple which served as 
the approach to the water-works a sweep of 
pavilions led back to the Grand Walk. In the 
last of these was a picture of Gay's ' Black 



244 Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 

Eyed Susan, 1 taken apparently at that affecting 
moment when, returning to shore from her 
faithful William, she ' waved her lily hand.' A 
little higher the Grand Walk was intersected at 
right angles by the Grand Cross Walk, which, 
as already stated, traversed the gardens. To 
the right this was terminated by the Druid's 
Walk and a statue of Apollo ; to the left, by one 
of the favourite illusions of the place, a large 
painting representing ruins and running water. 
In this part of the garden, as far as it is possible to 
make it out from the descriptions, extending on 
the left towards the bottom, were, on one side, 
a wilderness, on the other rural downs ' with 
several little eminences . . . after the manner 
of a Roman camp.' These were ' covered with 
turf, and pleasingly interspersed with cypress, 
fir, yew, cedar, and tulip trees/ On one of 
these heights, the attentive spectator soon dis- 
covered, like Pastor Moritz, Roubillac's statue 
(in lead) of Milton ' seated on a rock, in an at- 
titude listening to soft music,' as described by 
himself, in his ' II Penseroso.' At night this 
statue was lighted with lamps. From the 
downs, say the old guide books, you had a 
good view of Lambeth, Westminster, and St. 
Paul's. It was in this part of the garden also, 
from some of the bushes of the Roman camp, that 



Old Vauxloall Gardens. 245 

proceeded the subterranean entertainment known 
as the ' Fairy Music.' But this ' lodging on 
the cold ground/ to quote the old Caroline 
song, was found prejudicial to the instruments, 
probably also to the instrumentalists, and it was 
eventually discontinued. 

If, turning your back upon the picture of 
ruins and running water, you followed the Cross 
Walk behind the pavilions which formed the 
north side of the Grove, you came upon the 
South Walk, which ran parallel to the Grand 
Walk. The speciality of this promenade was 
its ' three splendid triumphal arches.' The 
vista through these arches was, at first, closed 
by a pictorial representation of the Ruins of Pal- 
myra. But the simulated ruins themselves grew 
ruinous, and finally made way for ' a noble view 
of architecture designed by Sandby [no doubt 
Hogarth's opponent of that name], and painted 
by Mortimer.' At night the same painter's work 
was exhibited in the form of an illuminated 
transparency. Where the South Walk ran 
parallel to the right side of the Grove was a 
further range of pavilions, part of which formed 
a semicircle shaded in front by lofty trees. In 
the centre of this semicircle stood, for some 
time, the cynosure of Vauxhall, Roubillac's 
statue of Handel, rather less than life-size, in the 



246 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

character of Orpheus playing on his lyre. It 
was, however, frequently moved ; and its differ- 
ent positions are a source of considerable mys- 
tification to the student of the old prints of the 
place. In 1774, according to Smith's ' Nolle- 
kens,' it had its habitat ' under an inclosed lofty 
arch, surmounted by a figure [of Saint Cecilia] 
playing the violoncello, attended by two boys ; 
and it was then screened from the weather by 
a curtain, which was drawn up when the visitors 
arrived.' In Canaletti's view of six years later 
it is disporting itself in the open, as above de- 
scribed ; but after the new Gothic orchestra was 
erected, it seems to have returned to its original 
retreat, and later still had found an asylum in a 
new supper-room which was added to the Ro- 
tunda. Bartolozzi is credited with a fine en- 
graving of this statue, which was the first work 
Roubillac carved in England. The statue is 
also said to have been highly ' approved of by 
Mr. Pope ;" and it may be added that the ears, 
which, as becoming in a composer, were espe- 
cially beautiful, were modelled from those of 
the daughter of the patentee of Covent Garden 
Theatre, — the Miss Rich (afterwards Mrs. 
Horsley), of whose alleged portrait by Hogarth 
there Is a beautiful modern mezzotint by Samuel 
Cousins. From the descriptions of critics, the 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 247 

Handel must nevertheless have been a repose- 
less and somewhat ' tortured 1 performance. It 
did not always remain at Vauxhall, and ulti- 
mately passed into the keeping of the descend- 
ants of the proprietor of the garden, where we 
need no further follow its fortunes. 

As already stated, each of the four sides of 
the quadrangle which enclosed the Grove was 
occupied by pavilions, alcoves, or booths fitted 
up for the accommodation of supper-parties. 
These were of varying importance, since we are 
expressly informed, in ' The Citizen of the 
World,' that some were more * genteel ' than 
others, and that those in that * very focus of 
public view, 1 affected by Goldsmith's Beau and 
his lady were appropriated more or less by per- 
sons of position. The one that fronted the 
Orchestra was larger than the rest, having been 
specially built for Frederick, Prince of Wales. 
It was decorated by Hayman with paintings 
from ' The Tempest,' ' King Lear,' « Macbeth,' 
and < Henry the Fifth,' and had behind it a 
handsome drawing-room. 

The mention of the decorations in the Prince 
of Wales's pavilion recalls one of the historical 
attractions of the gardens, — the pictures in the 
other supper-boxes. At night-time each of these 
was ' enlightened to the front with globes ; ' and 



248 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

a story which has always seemed to us a little 
indefinite, traces the first suggestion of them to 
Hogarth. But one of the earliest and most 
trustworthy of the guides — the ' Sketch of the 
Spring Gardens, Vauxhall : In a Letter to a 
Noble Lord 1 — implies that Hayman was the 
true originator in this matter. It is certain, 
however, that Hogarth contributed specimens 
of his own works to the cause, and that others 
were copied. According to his first annotator, 
Nichols, Hayman reproduced the ' Four Times 
of the Day' for Vauxhall ; and in 1782 two of 
these, ' Evening ' and ' Night,' were still there, 
and must have been seen by Moritz ; while in 
the portico of the Rotunda was an unquestioned 
picture from Hogarth's own brush, Henry the 
Eighth and Anne Boleyn, — names which, it was 
popularly whispered, but thinly veiled the like- 
nesses of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his 
mistress, Anne Vane, not to be confused with the 
notorious ' Lady of Quality ' of the same sur- 
name in Smollett's * Peregrine Pickle.' Another 
work claimed as Hogarth's when, years after, 
obscured by dirt and slashed by sandwich 
knives, the relics of the little gallery came to 
the hammer, was Harper and Mrs. Clive (then 
Miss Raftor) as ' Jobson the Cobbler 1 and his 
wife ' Nell ' in Coffey's farce of 'The Devil to 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 249 

pay ; or, the Wives Metamorphosed ; ' but this, 
as well as a nautical genre picture called ' The 
Wapping Landlady,' is plainly attributed to 
Hayman in the contemporary prints of Sayer. 
It is probable also that Hayman had the chief 
hand in ' Mademoiselle Catherina," a diminutive 
lady whose history has escaped the chroniclers, 
and ' Building Houses with Cards,' although 
the two children in the latter have certainly a 
look of his more illustrious contemporary. But, 
on the whole, it may be concluded that there 
was little of Hogarth's original work among the 
sea-fights, popular games (e.g. the time-honoured 
pastimes of * Bob Cherry ■ and * Hot Cockles '), 
and other engaging compositions which delighted 
the simple soul of the pawnbroker's widow and 
disgusted the eclectic Mr. Tibbs, full of Grisoni 
and the grand contorno. Hogarth's picture in 
the Rotunda portico, coupled with his permis- 
sion to reproduce his other works, would, how- 
ever, be ground enough to justify the gold ticket 
In perpetuam Beneficii memoriam with which he 
was presented by the grateful proprietor. This 
ticket, which admitted ' a coachful, 1 that is, six 
persons, was, in 1808, in the possession of Mrs. 
Hogarth's cousin, Mary Lewis, in whose arms 
the painter died. It had passed to other hands 
in 1825, when, with five silver passes, all said to 



250 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

be struck from Hogarth's designs, and including 
among the rest that of George Carey, the author 
of many Vauxhall songs, it was engraved for the 
' Londina Illustrata ' of Wilkinson. 

The greater part of the literary memories of 
Vauxhall Gardens cluster round these gaily 
painted boxes from which, at some moment of 
their careers, most of the notabilities of the day 
had taken their view of * many-coloured life.' 
Churchill we have already seen there in his 
habit as he lived ; and Collins is said to have 
divided his attentions between Vauxhall and the 
playhouses. Goldsmith and Reynolds, we know, 
were frequent visitors ; Johnson, according to 
Dr. Maxwell (and in spite of Rowlandson), was 
more partial to Ranelagh. It is in Vauxhall's 
' proud alcoves ' that Fielding places one of the 
scenes of ' Amelia ; ' prefacing it with a hand- 
some compliment to the extreme ' elegance ' 
and ' beauty ' of the place. The account of the 
rudeness which his heroine and her party suffered 
from Captain Trent and his companions is 
scarcely separable from its context, although it 
conveys a graphic idea, confirmed by other 
records, of the annoyances to which the more 
peaceable visitors were occasionally exposed at 
the hands of the Georgian man-about-town. 
But there is a pen-and-ink picture in Colman 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 251 

and Thornton's ' Connoisseur ' which, although 
mainly levelled at the exorbitant prices of pro- 
visions, may be taken to depict pretty accu- 
rately the humours of an ordinary middle-class 
family at Vauxhall. Mr. Rose, a tradesman, 
his wife, and his two daughters, make the turn 
of the place, and then sit down to supper. ' Do 
let us have a chick, papa, 1 says one of the young 
ladies. Papa replies that ' they are half a 
crown apiece, and no bigger than a sparrow.' 
Thereupon he is very properly rebuked by his 
wife for his stinginess. ' When one is out upon 
pleasure,' she says, ' I love to appear like some- 
body ; and what signifies a few shillings once 
and away, when a body is about it ? ' So the 
chick is ordered, and brought. And then en- 
sues a dialogue between the cit and the waiter, 
in which the former, from the price of the 
sample before him, ironically estimates the price 
of an entire Vauxhall ham to be about £24, 
and after being decorated by his wife with a 
coloured handkerchief by way of bib, proceeds 
to eat, saying at every mouthful, * There goes 
twopence, there goes threepence, there goes 
a groat.' Beef and cheese-cakes, which are 
also freely commented upon, follow, and finally 
Mr. Rose calls for a bottle of port, the size of 
which does not escape invidious comparison 



252 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

with the more generous vessels of the Jerusalem 
Coffee House, although the contents have the 
effect of soothing the critic into the unwonted 
extravagance of a second pint. Then, after the 
old lady has observed upon the rudeness of the 
gentlemen, who stare her out of countenance 
with their spy-glasses, and the younger girl is 
speculating whether, if she buys the words of 
the last new song, she can carry home the tune, 
arrives the reckoning, which is exactly thirteen 
shillings and twopence. The last glimpse we 
get of the little party shows them leaving the 
gardens in a shower, Madam with her upper 
petticoat thrown over her head, her daughters 
with turned-up skirts, and Paterfamilias with his 
flapped hat tied round with a pocket-handker- 
chief, his coat buttoned to save his laced waist- 
coat, and his wife's cardinal spread wrong side 
out over his shoulders to save his coat. So 
they sally out to their hack — he lamenting half 
humorously, half ruefully, that he might have 
spent his evening at Sot's Hole for fourpence 
halfpenny, whereas Vauxhall, with the coach 
hire, will have cost him ' almost a pound.' In 
the 'Wits' Magazine ' for 1784 you may see the 
whole group depicted to the life after the broad, 
ungentle fashion of the time. 
That the cost of the refreshments was a fer- 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 253 

tile topic of discussion is, to cite but one of 
many witnesses, confirmed by Miss Burney in 
1 Evelina ; ' and the popular legend that an ex- 
pert Vauxhall carver could cover the entire 
garden (about eleven acres) with slices from one 
ham, may be accepted as corroborative evi- 
dence. Old frequenters, indeed, pretended to 
remember the particular angle at which the 
plates had to be carried to prevent their leaf-like 
contents from becoming the plaything of the 
winds. But the above picture from the ' Con- 
noisseur,' it must be noted, is a picture of the 
occasional visitor, — the visitor who made but 
one annual visit, which was the event of the 
year. The main supporters of the place were 
the persons of quality, of whom Walpole gossips 
so delightfully in his correspondence ; and it is 
to his pages that one must go for a faithful rep- 
resentation of High Life at Vauxhall. In one 
of his letters to George Montagu, he describes, 
with his inimitable air of a fine gentleman on a 
frolic, a party of pleasure at which he has as- 
sisted, and which (he considers) exhibits ' the 
manners of the age.' He tells how he receives 
a card from Lady Caroline Petersham (the 
Duke of Grafton's daughter) to go with her to 
Vauxhall. Thereupon he repairs to her house, 1 
and finds ' her and the little Ashe, or the Pollard 



254 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Ashe, as they call her,' having ' just finished 
their last layer of red, and looking as handsome 
as crimson can make them.' Others of the 
company are the Duke of Kingston, Lord 
March of Thackeray's ' Virginians,' Mr. White- 
ned, ' a pretty Miss Beauclerc, and a very 
foolish Miss Sparre. 1 As they ' sail up the 
Mall,' they encounter cross-grained Lord Pe- 
tersham (my lady's husband), 'as sulky as a 
ghost that nobody will speak to first,' and who 
declines to accompany his wife and her friends. 
So they march to their barge, which has ' a boat 
of French horns attending,' and little Ashe 
sings. After parading up and down the river, 
they ' debark' at Vauxhall, where at the outset 
they narrowly escape the excitement of a duel. 
For a certain Mrs. Lloyd of Spring Gardens 
(afterwards married to Lord Haddington), seeing 
Miss Beauclerc and her companion following 
Lady Petersham, says audibly, ' Poor girls, I 
am sorry to see them in such bad company,' a 
remark which ' the foolish Miss Sparre ' (she is 
but fifteen), for the fun of seeing a duel, en- 
deavours to make Lord March resent. But my 
Lord, who is ' very lively and agreeable,' laughs 
her out of ' this charming frolic with a great 
deal of humour.' 4 At last,' says Walpole, — 
and here we may surrender the story to him 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 255 

entirely, — ' we assembled in our booth, Lady 
Caroline in the front, with the vizor of her hat 
erect, and looking gloriously jolly and hand- 
some. She had fetched my brother Oxford 
from the next box, where he was enjoying him- 
self with his petite partie, to help us to mince 
chickens. We minced seven chickens into a 
china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a 
lamp, with three pats of butter and a flagon of 
water, stirring, and rattling, and laughing, and 
we every minute expecting to have the dish fly 
about our ears. She had brought Betty [Neale] 
the fruit girl, with hampers of strawberries and 
cherries from Rogers's, and made her wait upon 
us, and then made her sup by us at a little table. 
The conversation was no less lively than the 
whole transaction. There was a Mr. O'Brien 
arrived from Ireland, who would get the 
Duchess of Manchester from Mr. Hussey if 
she were still at liberty. I took up the biggest 
hautboy in the dish, and said to Lady Caroline, 
" Madam, Miss Ashe desires you would eat 
this O'Brien strawberry ; " she replied immedi- 
ately, " I won't, you hussey." You may im- 
agine the laugh this reply occasioned. After 
the tempest was a little calmed, the Pollard 
said, *' Now, how anybody would spoil this 
story that was to repeat it and say, I won't, you 



256 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

jade ! " In short, the whole air of our party 
was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to 
take up the whole attention of the garden ; so 
much so, that from eleven o'clock till half an 
hour after one we had the whole concourse 
round our booth ; at last they came into the 
little gardens of each booth on the sides of ours, 
till Harry Vane took up a bumper and was pro- 
ceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. 
It was three o'clock before we got home.' 

Whether this ' frisk ' in good society included 
the passage of the Dark Walk, their chronicler 
has not related. But the Dark Walk, also 
known as the ' Druid's,' or ' Lover's Walk,' is 
almost the only feature of the gardens which 
now needs to be described. Its position has 
already been roughly indicated. It was formed 
by tall overarching trees meeting at the top, in 
which, in the place's palmiest days, blackbirds, 
thrushes, and nightingales made their nests. A 
visit to this selva oscura was the prime ambition 
of the more inquiring visitor to Vauxhall, either 
upon the simple ground put forward by the 
elder Miss Rose in the ' Connoisseur ' that it was 
4 solentary,' or upon the more specious excuse, 
advanced by the generality, that the music of the 
Orchestra sounded better through the thick foli- 
age of the trees. But the pretexts for seeking 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 257 

these attractive shades were probably as mani- 
fold as the conventional reasons for drinking, the 
last of which was ' any other reason.' In Miss 
Burney's ' Evelina,' that delightful heroine is 
decoyed into the Dark Walk by her vulgar 
friends the Branghtons. There she is insulted 
by a gang of rakes, and is rescued by Sir Cle- 
ment Willoughby, who, apparently under the 
influence of the genius loci, proceeds, after cer- 
tain impertinences, to make her a spasmodic 
declaration, plentifully punctuated with dashes 
in this wise, — ' O Miss Anville, — loveliest of 
women, — forgive me ; — my — I beseech you 
forgive me ; — if I have offended — if I have 
hurt you, — I could kill myself at the thought ! ' 
etc. Thus this ' most impetuous of men ; ' and 
thus did they make love in Vauxhall's ' green 
retreats ' ' when George was king.' Nor love 
alone, apparently ; for if the old descriptions are 
strictly accurate in representing some of its fre- 
quenters as yelling ' in sounds fully as terrific as 
the imagined horrors of Cavalcanti's blood- 
hounds,' there must have been a considerable 
amount of more than questionable horse-play 
besides ; and the licensing magistrates who, in 
1763, bound the proprietors to do away with 
the ' dark walks,' and to appoint proper watch- 
men, were no doubt well advised. 

17 



258 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

From the use of the plural ' walks,' it may 
be that the prohibition also included the numer- 
ous wildernesses which occupied the north of 
the enclosure, — wildernesses so intricate that, 
even in the prehistoric era of the place, the 
most experienced mothers — to use the ex- 
pressive words of Tom Brown ' of facetious 
memory ' — often ' lost themselves in look- 
ing for their daughters.' And this brings us 
to the final item in our catalogue, the walk 
which bounded the garden on the north, closing 
and terminating the four great promenades that 
traversed it from top to bottom. This, shaded 
like the rest by trees, had at each end one of 
the favourite ' scenes.' That to the east was 
a view in a Chinese garden ; that to the west, 
a building with a scaffold and a ladder be- 
fore it, which at a distance ' often deceived 
the eye very agreeably.' History has ne- 
glected the artist of these ingenious perform- 
ances. But Hayman had begun with stage 
decoration, and may perhaps have executed 
them. Or they may have been from the brush 
of George Lambert, the well-known scene- 
painter of Covent Garden, who, like Hayman, 
was a friend of Hogarth, and is reported to 
have borne his part in the beautifying of the 
place. 



Old Vauxhall Gardens. 259 

In the foregoing sketch we have endeav- 
oured to revive some specific idea of the aspect 
of a forgotten place of amusement, rather than 
to produce that indefinite patchwork of anec- 
dote which, with a judicious sprinkling of shoe- 
buckles and periwigs, of hoops and gipsy-hats, 
so often does duty for a ' picture of the time. 1 
But a last word must certainly be devoted to 
the proprietor and presiding spirit, Jonathan 
Tyers. Little seems to be known of him be- 
fore he acquired the site of the old Spring 
Garden of the 'Spectator 1 in March, 1728, 
from one Elizabeth Masters, of London, upon a 
thirty years 1 lease. Even then it must have had 
many of the appurtenances of a public resort, 
for the deed enumerates a Ham-room and a 
Milk-house, and there were already primitive 
alcoves in the shape of tiled arbours entitled 
Royal George, Ship, Eagle, Phoenix, Checker, 
and the like. Nay, there were already lofty 
trees which dated from the seventeenth century 
and the days of an earlier possessor, the Sir 
Samuel Morland of Pepys's Diary. The rent 
which Tyers paid was £2^0. He added music; 
then by degrees the orchestra and organ, the 
statues, the pictures, and the other adornments. 
He opened the garden in June, 1732, with illu- 
minations and a Ridotto AV Fresco, at which 



260 Eighteenth Century Vignettes. 

Frederick, Prince of Wales, was present ; and 
the company, numbering four hundred, wore 
masks, dominoes, and lawyers' gowns. Order 
was kept by a detachment of footguards, and 
the admission ticket was designed by Jack 
Laguerre, son of the Louis whose muscular 
saints sprawl, in Pope's verse, upon the ceil- 
ings of * Timon's Villa.' Payment was subse- 
quently made at the gate ; but in 1738, appar- 
ently with a view to render the attendance 
somewhat more select, a thousand silver season 
tickets were issued. In 1752 Tyers purchased 
part of the estate out and out, and a few years 
afterwards acquired the remainder. To the last 
day of his life he retained the keenest interest 
in the place, and only a few hours before his 
death caused himself to be carried into the 
gardens to take a parting look at them. At his 
country-seat of Denbighs near Dorking in 
Surrey, he had another private garden, in the 
embellishment of which he must have found an 
outlet for some otherwise obstructed eccentri- 
city, since it contained a representation of the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death, where, in an 
alcove, had been depicted, in two compartments, 
the ends of the infidel and the Christian. Ac- 
cording to the ' Gentleman's Magazine,' Tyers 
passed through the Valley himself in July, 1767. 



Old Vauxhall Gardens, 261 

His descendants long continued to manage 
Vauxhall Gardens. Perhaps the most notable 
of these was his eldest son Tom, the friend and 
biographer of Johnson, and the ' Tom Restless ' 
of the ' Idler.' 



THE END. 



NOV -8 i345 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Jan. 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 760 865 



